Frank Dowling should have found another form of exercise. He collides with Alice's knees, trips her and holds her up, beating a path through the dancers by main force and quite sure that he is dancing. Afterwards he steers her out of sight of his mother, who keeps signalling him to look after his sister Ella. With great honesty he explains: his mother wants him dancing with Mildred Palmer and Henrietta Lamb, but their cards are always full by the time he is free. 'So that's why you dance with me,' Alice says. He protests that he likes her better, because she is cordial to everybody.
In a nook of box-trees they meet Mildred leaving on the arm of a tall man of about thirty, and Alice has never seen her friend look up at anyone with such blushing deference. Frank is surprised she doesn't know him. This is Arthur Russell, a distant cousin of the Palmers, very well off, who arrived only yesterday, and everybody says Mildred will marry him. Mildred has never mentioned him to her 'most intimate friend', and the sting of that is saved for later. What shakes Alice now is a voice inside her that said, at first sight of him, 'That's exactly the kind of looking man I'd like to marry!' It seems to her that Providence has heaped every blessing on Mildred. While Frank watches the band at her urging, she quietly lays her dead violets at the foot of a box-tree.
Then Mrs. Dowling bears down on them, smiling with the lower half of her face. Frank refuses to be sent off to dance with Henrietta, so his mother lets her voice tremble in front of a stranger, and he is beaten at once. Alice tells him to go. Left alone, she practises an art she has had to master: seeming to have a partner when there is none. She keeps a hand on the empty chair beside her, taps one foot, and smiles as if her absent companion were off on some amusing errand. The young men who pass believe her; a few girls do not. She learned it in the last two years. At sixteen the nice boys crowded the Adamses' veranda; at eighteen the older men came. Then the other girls went away to school, came home and 'came out', fresh as jewels in a new box, while Alice stayed. She had been a belle too soon.
Coming Up in Chapter 8
The empty-chair trick can last only ten or fifteen minutes, and Alice counts the idle young men in the doorways as her time runs out. When one finally strolls across, it is the one she would rather avoid: glossy Harvey Malone, who calls her 'Lady Alicia' and drops into her absent partner's chair.
