Dance of the Happy Shades

wouldn’t let anybody get away with anything like that. Besides I’m not a maid really, it’s just for the summer. I don’t feel lonesome, why should I? I just observe and am interested. Mother, of course I can’t eat with them. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not the same thing as a hired girl at all. Also I prefer to eat alone. If you wrote Mrs. Gannett a letter she wouldn’t know what you were talking about, and I don’t mind.
So don’t!
    Also I think it would be better when Marion comes down if I took my afternoon off and met her downtown. I don’t want particularly to have her come here. I’m not sure how maids’ relatives come. Of course it’s all right if she wants to. I can’t always tell how Mrs. Gannett will react, that’s all, and I try to take it easy around her without letting her get away with anything. She is all right though.
    In a week we will be leaving for Georgian Bay and of course I am looking forward to that. I will be able to go swimming every day, she (Mrs. Gannett) says and—
    Her room was really too hot. She put the unfinished letter under the blotter on the desk. A radio was playing in Margaret’s room. She walked down the hall towards Margaret’s door, hoping it would be open. Margaret was not quite fourteen; the difference in age compensated for other differences, and it was not too bad to be with Margaret.
    The door was open, and there spread out on the bed were Margaret’s crinolines and summer dresses. Alva had not known she had so many.
    “I’m not really packing,” Margaret said. “I know it would be crazy. I’m just seeing what I’ve got. I hope my stuff is all right,” she said. “I hope it’s not too—”
    Alva touched the clothes on the bed, feeling a great delight in these delicate colours, in the smooth little bodices, expensively tucked and shaped, the crinolines with their crisp and fanciful bursts of net; in these clothes there was a very pretty artificial innocence. Alva was not envious; no, this had nothing to do with her; this was part of Margaret’s world, that rigid pattern of private school (short tunics and long black stockings), hockey, choir, sailing in summer, parties, boys who wore blazers—
    “Where are you going to wear them?” Alva said.
    “To the Ojibway. The hotel. They have dances every weekend, everybody goes down in their boats. Friday night is for kids and Saturday night is for parents and other people—That is I
will
be going,” Margaret said rather grimly, “if I’m not a social flop. Both the Davis girls are.”
    “Don’t worry,” Alva said a little patronizingly. “You’ll be fine.”
    “I don’t really like dancing,” Margaret said. “Not the way I like sailing, for instance. But you have to do it.”
    “You’ll get to like it,” Alva said. So there would bedances, they would go down in the boats, she would see them going and hear them coming home. All these things, which she should have expected—
    Margaret sitting cross-legged on the floor, looked up at her with a blunt, clean face, and said, “Do you think I ought to start to neck this summer?”
    “Yes,” said Alva. “
I
would,” she added almost vindictively. Margaret looked puzzled; she said, “I heard that’s why Scotty didn’t ask me at Easter—”
    There was no sound, but Margaret slipped to her feet. “Mother’s coming,” she said with her lips only, and almost at once Mrs. Gannett came into the room, smiled with a good deal of control, and said, “Oh, Alva. This is where you are.”
    Margaret said, “I was telling her about the Island, Mummy.”
    “Oh. There are an awful lot of glasses sitting around down there Alva, maybe you could whisk them through now and they’d be out of the way when you want to get dinner—And Alva, do you have a fresh apron?”
    “The yellow is so too tight, Mummy, I tried it on—”
    “Look, darling, it’s no use getting all that fripfrap out yet, there’s still a week before we go—”
    Alva went downstairs, passed along the blue hall, heard people talking seriously, a little drunkenly, in the den, and saw the door of the sewing-room closed softly, from within, as she approached. She went into the kitchen. She was thinking of the Island now. A whole island that they owned; nothing in sight that was not theirs. The rocks, the sun, the pine trees, and the deep, cold water of the Bay. What would she do there, what did the maids do? She could go swimming, at odd hours, go for walks by herself, and