Of course! You'll have a beautiful time, too. Henrietta'll see that you
have somebody to dance with besides Miss Dowling, poor man!"

"But what I want somebody to see is that I dance with you! And perhaps
your father----"

"Wait!" she said, frowning as if she debated whether or not to tell him
something of import; then, seeming to decide affirmatively, she asked:
"Would you really like to know the truth about it?"

"If it isn't too unflattering."

"It hasn't anything to do with you at all," she said. "Of course I'd
like to go with you and to dance with you--though you don't seem to
realize that you wouldn't be permitted much time with me."

"Oh, yes, I----"

"Never mind!" she laughed. "Of course you wouldn't. But even if papa
should be better to-morrow, I doubt if I'd go. In fact, I know I
wouldn't. There's another reason besides papa."

"Is there?"

"Yes. The truth is, I don't get on with Henrietta Lamb. As a matter of
fact, I dislike her, and of course that means she dislikes me. I should
never think of asking her to anything I gave, and I really wonder she
asks me to things SHE gives." This was a new inspiration; and Alice,
beginning to see her way out of a perplexity, wished that she had
thought of it earlier: she should have told him from the first that she
and Henrietta had a feud, and consequently exchanged no invitations.
Moreover, there was another thing to beset her with little anxieties:
she might better not have told him from the first, as she had indeed
told him by intimation, that she was the pampered daughter of an
indulgent father, presumably able to indulge her; for now she must
elaborately keep to the part. Veracity is usually simple; and its
opposite, to be successful, should be as simple; but practitioners of
the opposite are most often impulsive, like Alice; and, like her, they
become enmeshed in elaborations.

"It wouldn't be very nice for me to go to her house," Alice went on,
"when I wouldn't want her in mine. I've never admired her. I've always
thought she was lacking in some things most people are supposed to be
equipped with--for instance, a certain feeling about the death of a
father who was always pretty decent to his daughter. Henrietta's father
died just, eleven months and twenty-seven days before your cousin's
dance, but she couldn't stick out those few last days and make it a
year; she was there."

Alice stopped, then laughed ruefully, exclaiming, "But this is dreadful
of me