Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/237

 of age,” I said. “I have not danced for thirty years.”

“But it’s quite simple,” he explained. “Walk round the room in time with the music, turn when you feel inclined and add any frills you like when we’ve got into each other’s step.” And I did. . . Jean Yarrow I found later, helping him to cut sandwiches and bawling the most unsuitable answers to questions which, poor soul, she could not hear. When he said something about “potted tongue”, she thought he said “clot in the lung” and gave him a history of her own complaints which I could not help feeling was not suitable for the ears of a young man. . . The duke, meanwhile, was mixing cup by some secret process that he had learned at Cambridge; I hoped it would save the wine a little, but from this point of view it was not a success. They only asked for more, like that boy in the book. . . To use a favourite word of Will’s, Colonel Butler was a “superman.” But for him. . . I mean, there was plenty of high spirits but not a hint of rowdiness. And he was master of the ceremonies, cook, butler, carriage-finder. The older generation, too, has been so much thrust into the background that we find it refreshing