Presently he heard her voice within.
“Mother, the Haggertys have invited me for the last week in August.
I have half a mind to cut Tuxedo and go.
I like Bess Haggerty.”
“Well, you’ll have to decide that, dearest.
Are they going to be at Tarrytown or Loon Lake?”
“Loon Lake, of course,” came Berenice’s voice.
What a world of social doings she was involved in, thought Cowperwood.
She had begun well.
The Haggertys were rich coal-mine operators in Pennsylvania.
Harris Haggerty, to whose family she was probably referring, was worth at least six or eight million.
The social world they moved in was high.
They drove after dinner to The Saddler, at Saddler’s Run, where a dance and “moonlight promenade” was to be given.
On the way over, owing to the remoteness of Berenice, Cowperwood for the first time in his life felt himself to be getting old.
In spite of the vigor of his mind and body, he realized constantly that he was over fifty-two, while she was only seventeen.
Why should this lure of youth continue to possess him?
She wore a white concoction of lace and silk which showed a pair of smooth young shoulders and a slender, queenly, inimitably modeled neck.
He could tell by the sleek lines of her arms how strong she was.
“It is perhaps too late,” he said to himself, in comment.
“I am getting old.”
The freshness of the hills in the pale night was sad.
Saddler’s, when they reached there after ten, was crowded with the youth and beauty of the vicinity.
Mrs. Carter, who was prepossessing in a ball costume of silver and old rose, expected that Cowperwood would dance with her.
And he did, but all the time his eyes were on Berenice, who was caught up by one youth and another of dapper mien during the progress of the evening and carried rhythmically by in the mazes of the waltz or schottische.
There was a new dance in vogue that involved a gay, running step—kicking first one foot and then the other forward, turning and running backward and kicking again, and then swinging with a smart air, back to back, with one’s partner.
Berenice, in her lithe, rhythmic way, seemed to him the soul of spirited and gracious ease—unconscious of everybody and everything save the spirit of the dance itself as a medium of sweet emotion, of some far-off, dreamlike spirit of gaiety.
He wondered. He was deeply impressed.
“Berenice,” observed Mrs. Carter, when in an intermission she came forward to where Cowperwood and she were sitting in the moonlight discussing New York and Kentucky social life, “haven’t you saved one dance for Mr. Cowperwood?”
Cowperwood, with a momentary feeling of resentment, protested that he did not care to dance any more. Mrs. Carter, he observed to himself, was a fool.
“I believe,” said her daughter, with a languid air, “that I am full up.
I could break one engagement, though, somewhere.”
“Not for me, though, please,” pleaded Cowperwood.
“I don’t care to dance any more, thank you.”
He almost hated her at the moment for a chilly cat.
And yet he did not.
“Why, Bevy, how you talk!
I think you are acting very badly this evening.”
“Please, please,” pleaded Cowperwood, quite sharply.
“Not any more.
I don’t care to dance any more.”
Bevy looked at him oddly for a moment—a single thoughtful glance.
“But I have a dance, though,” she pleaded, softly. “I was just teasing.
Won’t you dance it with me?”
“I can’t refuse, of course,” replied Cowperwood, coldly.
“It’s the next one,” she replied.
They danced, but he scarcely softened to her at first, so angry was he.
Somehow, because of all that had gone before, he felt stiff and ungainly.
She had managed to break in upon his natural savoir faire—this chit of a girl.
But as they went on through a second half the spirit of her dancing soul caught him, and he felt more at ease, quite rhythmic.
She drew close and swept him into a strange unison with herself.