But Emily drifted out shyly, fussed carefully with fans or glove- clasps while looking furtively about for possible partners, returned in a panic to the dressing-room on a pretense of exploring a slipper-bag for a handkerchief, and made a fresh start. Perhaps this time some group of chattering and laughing girls and men would be too close to the door for her comfort; not invited to join them, Emily would feel obliged to drift on across the floor to greet some gracious older woman, and sink into a chair, smiling at compliments, and covering a defeat with a regretful: "I'm really only looking on to-night. Mama worries so if I overdo."
And here she would feel out of the current indeed, hopelessly shelved. Who would come looking for a partner in this quiet corner, next to old Mrs. Chickering whose two granddaughters were in the very center of the merry group at the door? Emily would smilingly rise, and go back to the dressing-room again.
The famous Browning dances, in their beginning, a generation earlier, had been much smaller, less formal and more intimate than they were now. The sixty or seventy young persons who went to those first dances were all close friends, in a simpler social structure, and a less self-conscious day. They had been the most delightful events in Ella's girlhood, and she felt it to be entirely Emily's fault that Emily did not find them equally enchanting.
"But I don't know the people who go to them very well!" Emily would say, half-confidential, half-resentful. Ella always met this argument with high scorn.
"Oh, Baby, if you'd stop whining and fretting, and just get in and enjoy yourself once!" Ella would answer impatiently. "You don't have to know a man intimately to dance with him, I should hope! Just GO, and have a good time! My Lord, the way we all used to laugh and talk and rush about, you'd have thought we were a pack of children!"
Ella and her contemporaries always went to these balls even now, the magnificent matrons of forty showing rounded arms and beautiful bosoms, and gowns far more beautiful than those the girls wore. Jealousy and rivalry and heartaches all forgot, they sat laughing and talking in groups, clustered along the walls, or played six- handed euchre in the adjoining card-room, and had, if the truth had been known, a far better time than the girls they chaperoned.
After a winter or two, however, Emily stopped going, except perhaps once in a season. She began to devote a great deal of her thought and her conversation to her health, and was not long in finding doctors and nurses to whom the subject was equally fascinating. Emily had a favorite hospital, and was frequently ordered there for experiences that touched more deeply the chords of her nature than anything else ever did in her life. No one at home ever paid her such flattering devotion as did the sweet-faced, low-voiced nurses, and the doctor--whose coming, twice a day, was such an event. The doctor was a model husband and father, his beautiful wife a woman whom Ella knew and liked very well, but Emily had her nickname for him, and her little presents for him, and many a small, innocuous joke between herself and the doctor made her feel herself close to him. Emily was always glad when she could turn from her mother's mournful solicitude, Kenneth's snubs and Ella's imperativeness, and the humiliating contact with a society that could get along very well without her, to the universal welcome she had from all her friends in Mrs. Fowler's hospital.