Lost Lake House Read Free Page A

music, to
feel that magical sense of lightness when her feet caught the
rhythm of a song. While the mellow, swinging music poured out from
among the ferns, and her nimble scuffed shoes whisked lightly and
skillfully across the polished floor, she was perfectly happy, and
it almost did not matter who her partner was so long as he was a
good dancer—although there were certain ones among the Lost Lake
House habitués whom she preferred not to have if she could
help it, for reasons separate from their dancing.
    For several dances she was happily engaged,
and then, her final partner departing and no other immediately
appearing, Dorothy sat down on a sofa in a corner, and found
herself alone for a few minutes. She watched the drifting,
fox-trotting crowd on the ballroom floor—the men in elegant black
evening dress, the feathers and rhinestones against the women’s
shingled hair, the bright-colored silken frocks with draped backs
and necklines—and many smart shoes. Many of the couples who drifted
in through one particular door on the north side of the ballroom
had glasses in their hands, and these were always a little more
raucous and a little less in time to the music. Dorothy half
unconsciously tucked one foot under her on the sofa, as she often
sat in her bedroom at home, feeling an unreasoning little pinch of
loneliness. She liked the crowding and the glamor in its impersonal
sense, but when she began to look at the people as individuals she
sometimes felt a queer sense of depression she could not
identify.
    She flicked the thought away. Once she was
out in the middle of it again the moving colors of the kaleidoscope
would close round her and make her forget she had seen anything
unsettling when the whirl slowed.
    Kitty and Sadie and Ida Greenbush washed up
on the shores of the dance floor, each with her arm linked through
that of a much-slicked-up and endlessly grinning young man. They
descended on Dorothy’s corner, appropriated the ends of her sofa,
and being in search of amusement, found it in teasing her.
    “Dolly’s mad because they’re not playing the
Charleston often enough,” cried Sadie Penniman. “She just can’t
keep her feet still two seconds together.”
    “Unless she sits on them,” pointed out one
of the young men, and the entire party found this hilarious.
    “Just don’t dance it with Horace next time.
He tires so easily,” said Kitty Lawrence, with a proprietary
little knife-slice in her voice that was meant to keep Horace in
line.
    “Oh, certainly. I wouldn’t harm poor Horace
for the world,” said Dorothy, who possessed a tongue of her own;
and Horace, his arm still safely linked through Kitty’s as though
in irons, managed a sickly smile.
    “Personally, I find all this dancing exhausting ,” said Ida Greenbush, striking a languid pose and
looking out through the French windows toward an imaginary horizon.
“I should much prefer a stroll on the terrace, wouldn’t you,
Peter?”
    Peter was never allowed to get a word in
edgewise, so his opinion was negligible. Kitty and Sadie were
already trilling with laughter over the ridiculousness of someone
named Maude with whom they had amused themselves on the other side
of the ballroom, and her infatuation with a man who wouldn’t look
at her. Dorothy sat and fingered her scuffed toe and thought about
having a headache.
    She glanced toward the hall, and sat up a
little straighter, something like an agitated butterfly fluttering
up in her chest for a moment. Sloop Jackson was approaching, his
hands in his trousers pockets, wearing his usual smile of calm
assurance that he would find everything the way he wanted it. The
smile flickered into one of subtle amusement as his eyes fell on
Dorothy, and she turned her head back toward the others and folded
her hands in her lap. She was never sure what Sloop Jackson thought
about her that it should always bring that provoking smile to his
face.
    He bore casually down upon the group around
the sofa,