“Josephine,” Ridgeway Saunders began, “you can’t realize how happy I am now that it’s come true. I’ve looked forward to this so long, and dreamed about it—”
She smiled up at him automatically, but her mind was elsewhere, and as the dance progressed the idea continued to obsess her. She was rushed from the beginning; to the men from the tea were added a dozen new faces, a dozen confident or timid voices, until, like all the more popular girls, she had her own queue trailing her about the room. Yet all this had happened to her before, and there was something missing. One might have ten men to Adele’s two, but Josephine was abruptly aware that here a girl took on the importance of the man who had brought her.
She was discomforted by the unfairness of it. A girl earned her popularity by being beautiful and charming. The more beautiful and charming she was, the more she could afford to disregard public opinion. It seemed absurd that simply because Adele had managed to attach a baseball captain, who mightn’t know anything about girls at all, or be able to judge their attractions, she should be thus elevated in spite of her thick ankles, her rather too pinkish face.
Josephine was dancing with Ed Bement from Chicago. He was her earliest beau, a flame of pigtail days in dancing school when one wore white cotton stockings, lace drawers with a waist attached and ruffled dresses with the inevitable sash.
“What’s the matter with me?” she asked Ed, thinking aloud. “For months I’ve felt as if I were a hundred years old, and I’m just seventeen and that party was only seven years ago.”
“You’ve been in love a lot since then,” Ed said.
“I haven’t,” she protested indignantly. “I’ve had a lot of silly stories started about me, without any foundation, usually by girls who were jealous.”
“Jealous of what?”
“Don’t get fresh,” she said tartly. “Dance me near Lillian.”
Dudley Knowleton had just cut in on Lillian. Josephine spoke to her friend; then waiting until their turns would bring them face to face over a space of seconds, she smiled at Knowleton. This time she made sure that smile intersected as well as met glance, that he passed beside the circumference of her fragrant charm. If this had been named like French perfume of a later day it might have been called “Please.” He bowed and smiled back; a minute later he cut in on her.
It was in an eddy in a corner of the room and she danced slower so that he adapted himself, and for a moment they went around in a slow circle.
“You looked so sweet leading the march with Adele,” she told him. “You seemed so serious and kind, as if the others were a lot of children. Adele looked sweet, too.” And she added on an inspiration, “At school I’ve taken her for a model.”
“You have!” She saw him conceal his sharp surprise as he said, “I’ll have to tell her that.”
He was handsomer than she had thought, and behind his cordial good manners there was a sort of authority. Though he was correctly attentive to her, she saw his eyes search the room quickly to see if all went well; he spoke quietly, in passing, to the orchestra leader, who came down deferentially to the edge of his dais. Last man for Bones. Josephine knew what that meant—her father had been Bones. Ridgeway Saunders and the rest of the Loving Brothers’ Association would certainly not be Bones. She wondered, if there had been a Bones for girls, whether she would be tapped—or Adele Craw with her ankles, symbol of solidity.
Come on o-ver here,
Want to have you near;
Come on join the part-y,
Get a wel-come heart-y.
“I wonder how many boys here have taken you for a model,” she said. “If I were a boy you’d be exactly what I’d like to be. Except I’d be terribly bothered having girls falling in love with me all the time.”
“They don’t,” he said simply. “They never have.”
“Oh, yes—but they hide it because they’re so impressed with you, and they’re afraid of Adele.”
“Adele wouldn’t object.” And he added hastily, “—if it ever happened. Adele doesn’t believe in being serious about such things.”
“Are you engaged to her?”
He stiffened a little. “I don’t believe in being engaged till the right time comes.”
“Neither do I,” agreed Josephine readily. “I’d rather have one good friend than a hundred people hanging around being mushy all the time.”
“Is that what that crowd does that keeps following you around tonight?”
“What crowd?” she asked innocently.
“The fifty per cent of the sophomore class that’s rushing you.”
“A lot of parlour snakes,” she said ungratefully.
Josephine was radiantly happy now as she turned beautifully through the newly enchanted ball in the arms of the chairman of the prom committee. Even this extra time with him she owed to the awe which he inspired in her entourage; but a man cut in eventually and there was a sharp fall in her elation. The man was impressed that Dudley Knowleton had danced with her; he was more respectful, and his modulated admiration bored her. In a little while, she hoped, Dudley Knowleton would cut back, but as midnight passed, dragging on another hour with it, she wondered if after all it had only been a courtesy to a girl from Adele’s school. Since then Adele had probably painted him a neat little landscape of Josephine’s past. When finally he approached her she grew tense and watchful, a state which made her exteriorly pliant and tender and quiet. But instead of dancing he drew her into the edge of a row of boxes.
“Adele had an accident on the cloakroom steps. She turned her ankle a little and tore her stocking on a nail. She’d like to borrow a pair from you because you’re staying near here and we’re way out at the Lawn Club.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll run over with you—I have a car outside.”
“But you’re busy, you mustn’t bother.”
“Of course I’ll go with you.”
There was thaw in the air; a hint of thin and lucid spring hovered delicately around the elms and cornices of buildings whose bareness and coldness had so depressed her the week before. The night had a quality of asceticism, as if the essence of masculine struggle were seeping everywhere through the little city where men of three centuries had brought their energies and aspirations for winnowing. And Dudley Knowleton sitting beside her, dynamic and capable, was symbolic of it all. It seemed that she had never met a man before.
“Come in, please,” she said as he went up the steps of the house with her. “They’ve made it very comfortable.”
There was an open fire burning in the dark parlour. When she came downstairs with the stockings she went in and stood beside him, very still for a moment watching it with him. Then she looked up, still silent, looked down, looked at him again.
“Did you get the stockings?” he asked, moving a little.
“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Kiss me for being so quick.”
He laughed as if she said something witty and moved towards the door. She was smiling and her disappointment was deeply hidden as they got into the car.
“It’s been wonderful meeting you,” she told him. “I can’t tell you how many ideas I’ve gotten from what you said.”
“But I haven’t any ideas.”
“You have. All that about not getting engaged till the proper time comes. I haven’t had much opportunity to talk to a man like you. Otherwise my ideas would be different, I guess. I’ve just realized that I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. I used to want to be exciting. Now I want to help people.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “that’s very nice.”
He seemed about to say more when they arrived at the armoury. In their absence supper had begun; and crossing the great floor by his side, conscious of many eyes regarding them, Josephine wondered if people thought that they had been up to something.
“We’re late,” said Knowleton when Adele went off to put on the stockings. «The man you’re with has probably given you up long ago. You’d better let me get you something here.”
“That would be too divine.”
Afterwards, back on the floor again, she moved in a sweet aura of abstraction. The followers of several departed belles merged with hers until now no girl on the floor was cut in on with such frequency. Even Miss Brereton’s nephew, Ernest Waterbury, danced with her in stiff approval. Danced? With a tentative change of pace she simply swung from man to man in a sort of hands-right-and-left around the floor. She felt a sudden need to relax, and as if in answer to her mood a new man was presented, a tall, sleek Southerner with a persuasive note:
“You lovely creacha. I been strainin my eyes watchin your cameo face floatin round. You stand out above all these othuz like an
