blue, keen eyes and small hands. He ate daintily, but with an appetite. The stories he told were pointed with wit, and cosmopolitan in character. He had traveled a great deal and said that Hildegarde ought to travel.
"Your father must take you to Paris."
She wanted to tell him that they couldn't afford it. But she wasn't sure that she had a right to say such things to her father's friends. And would they believe it if she said it? A man who could afford a dinner like this might find a way to go to Paris. The dinner was perfect. It was the season for game, and there were ducks—oysters had formed the first course, there were avocados for the salad, and the ices were from Baltimore.
Whose money had paid for it? Or had it been paid for? The thought troubled her. To her straight-thinking honesty, the honesty of her mother and of her aunts, there was something sinister in the fact that her father, hounded for money, could buy such dresses for his daughter, and such dinners for his friends.
Yet she was proud of him. Indeed, it seemed amazing to know that he was her father—at his ease, almost youthful in his enjoyment of the hospitality which he dispensed, he seemed utterly divorced from anything that had belonged to her before—he shone with an effulgence that startled her and seemed to separate her from him by the difference which environment had made in them.
After dinner everybody but Hildegarde danced or played cards. Miss Anne, arranging a table, said, "Will you join us, my dear, or dance?"
