Nothing very original about its being a masquerade, from Mr. Piper a
courteously grey-haired mandarin in jade-green robes beside Mrs. Piper--
lovely Mary Embree that was--in the silks of a Chinese empress, heavy and
shining and crusted as the wings of a jeweler's butterfly, her reticent
eyes watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing as impassively as
if she were viewing men being tortured or invested with honor from the
Dragon Throne, to Oliver, a diffident Pierrot who has discovered no even
bearably comfortable way of combining spectacles and a mask, and Peter who
[Illustration: THE LAST PIPER DANCE HAS BEEN THE OFFICIAL PERIOD TO THE
SOUTHAMPTON SUMMER] is gradually turning purple under the furs of a
dancing bear. Nothing much out of the ordinary in the tunes and the three
orchestras and the fact that a dozen gentlemen dressed as the Devil are
finding their tails very inconvenient as regards the shimmy and a dozen
Joans of Arc are eying each other with looks of dumb hatred whenever they
pass. Nothing singular about the light-heart throb of the music, the smell
of powder and scent and heat and flowers, the whole loose drifting garland
of the dancers, blowing over and around the floor in the idle designs of
sand, floating like scraps of colored paper through a smooth wind heavy
with music as the hours run away like light water through the fingers.
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