Curiously, he opened the door to the dining room and discovered the phonograph going and his daughter in a crouching posture, arms outspread, head projecting from its proper neck, eyes half closed. When she saw him, she straightened up.
“I thought that this ‘Cheek by Jowl’ was broken,” he said.
“It is, but you can still play the inside a little. See, it’s over already. You certainly can’t object to that much of a record.”
“Let’s put it on again,” he suggested facetiously, “and we’ll dance.”
She looked at him with infinite compassion.
“Who do you imagine you are, daddy? Fred Astaire? What I want to know is if I can go to Princeton.”
“I said yes, didn’t I?”
“But you didn’t say it like when you mean it.”
“Yes, then—yes. Get enough rope and hang yourself.”
“Then I can go?”
“Yes, of course. Why not? Where do you think you’re going? To the prom or something? Of course, you can go.”
II
Having lunch on the train, the three girls were a little bit mad with excitement. Clara Hannaman and Dizzy Campbell were fourteen, a year older than Gwen, and Clara was already somewhat taller, but they were all dressed alike in suits that might have been worn by their mothers. Their jewelry consisted of thin rings and chains, legacies from grandmothers, supplemented by flamboyant Koh-i-noors from the five-and-ten; and it was true that their coats might once have responded to wheedling calls of “Pussy,” “Bunny,” or “Nanny.” But it was their attacks of hysteria that stamped them as of a certain age.
Clara had asked: “What kind of a joint is this we’re going to?” She was temporarily under the spell of Una Merkel and the hard-boiled school, and this question was enough to start a rat-tat-tat of laughter, to the extent that eating was suspended, napkins called into play. One word was usually enough to send them off; frequently it was a boy’s name that had some private meaning to them, and for a whole afternoon or evening this single word would serve as detonator. At other times a curious soberness fell upon all of them, a sort of quietude. They faced both ways—toward a world they were fast leaving and a world they had never met—and the contradiction was externalized in the uncanny mirth.
There was a sober moment now when they all looked at the girl across the way, who was the debutante of the year and bound for the fall prom. They looked with respect, even a certain awe, impressed with her ease and tranquility in the face of her ordeal. It made them feel very young and awkward, and they were both glad and sorry that they were too young for the prom. Last year that girl had been only the captain of the basketball team at school; now she was in the Great Game, and they had noted the men who came to see her off at the station with flowers and adjurations not to “fall for any babies up there… Be five years before they get a job.”
After luncheon, the three girls planned to study—they had conscientiously brought books along—but the excitement of the train was such that they never got any farther than the phrase “jeweled stomacher” from an English-history lesson—which thereafter became their phrase for the day. They reached Princeton in an uncanny, explosive quiet, because Dizzy claimed to have forgotten her jeweled stomacher on the train, but their wild chuckles changed to a well-bred reserve as they were greeted on the platform by Miss Ray, young and lovely and twenty.
Where were the boys? They peered for them through the early dusk, not expecting to be greeted like prom girls, but there might have been someone of their own age, the one for whom they had dressed and dreamed and waved their locks sidewise in these last twenty-four hours. When they reached the house, Miss Ray exploded the bomb; while they took off their coats, she said:
“You’re due for a disappointment. I tried to reach you by telegraphing and telephone, too, but you’d already left.”
Their eyes turned toward her, apprehensive, already stricken.
“Seems that grandmother’s not well, and mother felt she had to go up to Albany. So, before I was even awake, she called off the little dance, and she’d phoned everybody. I tried to fix it up, but it was too late.”
Now their faces were utterly expressionless.
“Mother was excited, that’s all,” continued Miss Ray. “Grandmother’ll live to be a hundred. I’ve been on the phone all afternoon trying to find some company for you girls for this evening, but the town’s a madhouse and nobody’s available—the boys for the little dance were coming from New York. Lord, if I’d only waked up before eleven o’clock!”
“We don’t mind,” Dizzy lied gently. “Really we don’t, Esther. We can amuse ourselves.”
“Oh, darling, I know how you feel!”
“Yes,” they said together, and Dizzy asked, “Where’s Shorty? Did he have to go to Albany too?”
“No, he’s here. But he’s only sixteen and—— I hardly know how to explain it, but he’s the youngest man in his class in college, and very small, and this year he’s just impossibly shy. When the party was called off, he just refused to appear as the only boy; said he’d stay in his room and study chemistry, and there he is. And he won’t come out.”
Gwen formed a mental picture of him. Better that he remained in his hermitage; they could have more fun without him.
“Anyhow, you’ll have the game tomorrow.”
“Yes,” they said together.
That was that. Upstairs they took out their evening gowns, which, according to modern acceptance, were as long and as chic as any adult evening gowns, and laid them on their beds. They brought out their silk hosiery, their gold or silver sandal dancing shoes, and surveyed the glittering exhibit. At that age, their mothers would have worn ruffles, flounces and cotton stockings to brand them as adolescent. But this historical fact, dinned into them for many years, was small consolation now.
After they had dressed, things seemed better, even though they were only dressing for one another; when they went down to dinner, they gave such an impression of amiability and gaiety that they convinced even Esther Ray. It was difficult, though, when Miss Ray’s escort called to take her to the Harvard-Princeton concert, and she must have seen it in their eyes.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “I think we can get you into the concert, but you may have to stand up in back.”
That was something indeed. They brightened. They ran for coats; and Gwen caught sight of a very hurried young man in the upper hall with a plate in one hand and a cup in the other, but he disappeared into his room before she could see him plainly.
In any event, the concert turned out as precariously as most improvisations—it was jammed, and they were obliged to stand behind rows of taller people and to listen to tantalizing bursts of laughter and fragments of song—while from Clara’s superior three inches they gathered such information as they could as to what it looked like.
When it was over, they were washed out with the happy, excited crowd, driven back to the Rays’, and dumped almost brusquely on the doorstep.
“Good night. Thanks.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“It was fine!”
“Thanks. Good night.”
Upstairs they moved around in silence, casting stray glances at themselves in the mirror and rearranging, to no purpose now, some bit of awry finery. Dizzy had even taken off her necklace of seed pearls, when Gwen said suddenly:
“I want to go to the prom.”
“Who doesn’t?” Clara said. Suddenly she looked at Gwen sharply and asked: “What do you mean, Gwen?”
Gwen was drawing her lips in the mirror with Dizzy’s lipstick. She would have had one along herself, save it had melted going through Alabama on the way to the ranch last summer, and she had never since been able to get the top off it. Clara watched her until Gwen said:
“How would you make up if you were going to the prom?”
“Like this,” Clara suggested.
In a minute they were all at it.
“Not like that; that looks very ordinary.” And: “Remember, that’s Esther’s eye pencil. That’s too much, Dizzy.”
“Not with powder, it isn’t.”
Within half an hour they had somehow managed to age themselves by several years, and crying: “Bring on my jeweled stomacher,” they minced, paraded and danced around the room.
“I’ll tell you what,” Gwen said. “I just sort of want to go to the outside of the prom. I mean I don’t want to do anything bad, you know, but I want to see how they work it.”
“Esther might see us.”
“She won’t,” said Gwen sagely. “She’s probably having herself a time, and that girl on the train too—that Marion Lamb—you know, we used to know her in school. You take a lot of these debutantes,” she continued, “and when they get by themselves—pretty cute is what I would say, if you asked me.”
Dizzy looked like white-pine shavings; even her eyes were so light and virginal that what she said now came as a sort of shock to the other two:
“We’ll do it—we’ll go to the prom. We’ve got more what it takes than most of those girls.”
“Of course this isn’t like a city,” Clara suggested uncertainly. “It’s perfectly all right; it’s just the same as going out in your yard.”
This remark was calming to their consciences, but they were really less
