On the road, in England,
when they had been fellow-members of the Number Two company of
_The Heavenly Waltz_, Polly had been remarkable chiefly for a
fund of humorous anecdote and a gift, amounting almost to genius,
for doing battle with militant landladies. And renewing their
intimacy after a hiatus of a little less than a year Claire had
found her unchanged.
It was a truculent affair, this Dream of Psyche. It was not so much
dancing as shadow boxing. It began mildly enough to the accompaniment
of _pizzicato_ strains from the orchestra--Psyche in her training
quarters. _Rallentando_--Psyche punching the bag. _Diminuendo_--Psyche
using the medicine ball. _Presto_--Psyche doing road work. _Forte_--The
night of the fight. And then things began to move to a climax. With
the fiddles working themselves to the bone and the piano bounding
under its persecutor's blows, Lady Wetherby ducked, side-stepped,
rushed, and sprang, moving her arms in a manner that may have been
classical Greek, but to the untrained eye looked much more like the
last round of some open-air bout.
It was half-way through the exhibition, when you could smell the
sawdust and hear the seconds shouting advice under the ropes, that
Claire, who, never having seen anything in her life like this
extraordinary performance, had been staring spellbound, awoke to
the realization that Dudley Pickering was proposing to her.
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