The deciding factor was that they had been cheated by their elders. Though Bryan had never met Mrs. Ray, he somehow seemed to share in her disastrous excitability of the morning. This was the sort of thing that parents did as a class. The sort of thing for which they had joint responsibility. Before Gwen and Dizzy had agreed to the excursion in words, they bumped shoulders around the mirror, modifying their faces until the theatrical quality yielded to the more seemly pigmentation of an embassy ball. In the last burst of conservatism, for they might run inadvertently into Esther Ray, they cleansed the area around their eyes, leaving only the faintest patina of evening on lips and noses. The ten-cent crown jewels disappeared from ear and wrist and throat so quickly that when they went downstairs all taint of the side show had disappeared. Taste had triumphed.
Issuing into a clear brilliant November night, they walked along a high exuberant street beneath the dark trees of Liberty Place—though that meant nothing to them. A dog panicked them momentarily from behind a hedge, but they met no further obstacle until it was necessary to pass beneath a bright arc on Mercer Street.
“Where are we going?” Clara asked.
“Up to where we can hear it.”
She stopped. Figures had loomed up ahead, and they linked arms protectively, but it was only two colored women carrying a basket of laundry between them.
“Come on,” Gwen said.
“Come on to where?”
“To where we’re going.”
They reached a cathedral-like structure which Clara recognized as a corner of the campus, and by a sort of instinct they turned into an archway, threaded a deserted cloister and came out into a wider vista of terraces and Gothic buildings, and suddenly there was music in the air. After a few hundred yards, Dizzy pulled them up short.
“I see it,” she whispered. “It’s that big building down there with all the lights. That’s the gymnasium.”
“Let’s go closer,” said Gwen. “There isn’t anybody around. Let’s go till we see somebody, anyhow.”
Arms linked, they marched on in the shadow of the long halls. They were getting dangerously close to the zone of activity, could distinguish figures against the blur of the gymnasium entrance, and hear the applause in the intervals. Once more they stopped, afraid either to go on or to hold their ground, for there were voices and footsteps approaching out of the darkness.
“Over at the other side,” Clara suggested. “It’s dark there and we can get really close.”
They left the path and ran across the turf; stopped, breathless, in the haven of a group of parked cars. Here they huddled silently, feeling like spies behind the enemy lines. Within the great bulky walls, fifty feet away, a sonorous orchestra proclaimed a feeling that someone was fooling, announced that someone was its lucky star, and demanded if it wasn’t a lovely day to be caught in the rain. Inside those walls existed ineffable romance—an orchid-colored dream in which floated prototypes of their future selves, surrounded, engulfed, buoyed up by unnumbered boys. No one spoke; there was no more to say than the orchestra was saying to their young hearts, and when the music stopped, they did not speak; then suddenly they realized that they were not alone.
“We can eat later,” a man’s voice said.
“I don’t care about it at all, when I’m with you.”
The three young girls caught their breath in a gasp, clutched at one another’s arms. The voices came from a car not five feet from where they stood; it was turned away from the gymnasium, so that under cover of the music, their approach had gone unobserved.
“What’s one supper,” the girl continued, “when I think of all the suppers we’ll have together all through life?”
“Beginning next June, darling.”
“Beginning next June, darling, darling, darling.”
And once again a clutching went on among the listeners. For the girl’s voice was that of Marion Lamb, the debutante who had been on the train.
At this point, because it was a rather cool night and her evening cloak was thin, Dizzy sneezed—sneezed loudly and sneezed again.
III
“But how do we know you kids won’t tell?” the man was demanding. He turned to Marion: “Can’t you explain to them how important it is not to tell? Explain that it’ll absolutely wreck your debut at home.”
“But I don’t care, Harry. I’d be proud——”
“I care. It simply can’t get around now.”
“We won’t tell,” the young girls chorused ardently. And Gwen added: “We think it’s cute.”
“Do you realize you’re the only ones that know?” he asked sternly. “The only ones! And if it slipped out, I’d know who told, and——”
There were such sinister threats in his voice that instinctively the trio recoiled a step.
“That isn’t the way to talk to them,” said Marion. “I went to school with these girls and I know they won’t tell. Anyhow, they know it’s not serious—that I get engaged every few weeks or so.”
“Marion,” cried the young man, “I can’t stand hearing you talk like that!”
“Oh, Harry, I didn’t mean to hurt you!” she gasped, equally upset. “You know there’s never been anyone but you.”
He groaned.
“Well, how are we going to silence this gallery?” Distraught, he fumbled in his pocket for money.
“No, Harry. They’ll keep quiet.” But looking at those six eyes, she felt a vast misgiving. “Listen, what would you three like more than anything in the world?”
They laughed and looked at one another.
“To go to the prom, I guess,” said Gwen frankly. “But of course, we wouldn’t be allowed to. Our parents wouldn’t let us, even if we were invited—I mean——”
“I’ve got the idea,” said Harry. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I know a side entrance that leads up to the indoor track. How would you like to sit up there in the dark and look on awhile without anybody seeing you?”
“Whew!” said Dizzy.
“If I take you up there, will you give me your sacred words of honor that you’ll never breathe a word of what you heard tonight?”
“Will we!” they exclaimed together.
IV
Leaving them on the running track, the focusing eye must move down momentarily to the thick of the dance below. Or rather to its outskirts, where a person had just appeared who has hitherto played a small and sorry part in this history, and there he stood uncertainly, his view obscured by a throbbing Harvard-Princeton stag line. If, half an hour before, anyone had told Shorty Ray that eleven o’clock would find him in his present situation, he would not even have said, “Huh!” Some boys of inconsiderable height are compensated by an almost passionate temerity. Not Shorty; since adolescence, he never had been able to face girls with a minimum of dignity. The dance at home was part of a campaign to break him of his shyness, and it had seemed a stroke of luck to him that if his grandmother’s health were going to fail anyhow, it should have chosen this particular day.
As if in retribution for this irreverence, a telegram from Albany addressed to his sister had come to the house at the very moment when he had started to turn out his lights.
An older man would have torn open the telegram and read it, but anything sealed was sacred to him, and such telegrams spelled emergencies. There was nothing for it save to get it to Esther in the gymnasium as quickly as possible.
One thing he knew—he would not go upon the dance floor in search of her. After he had argued his way past the doorkeeper, he was simply standing there feeling helpless, when Dizzy spied him from above.
“There’s Tommy!” she exclaimed.
“Where?”
“The short boy by the door. Well, that’s pathetic, if you ask me! He wouldn’t even come out and look at us, and then he goes to the prom.”
“He doesn’t seem to be having much of a time,” said Clara.
“Let’s go down and cheer him up,” Gwen suggested.
“Not me,” said Dizzy. “For one thing, I wouldn’t want the Rays to know we were here.”
“I forgot about that.”
“Anyhow, he’s gone now.”
He was gone, but not, as they supposed, into the delirious carnival. Irresolute, he had finally conceived the idea of mounting to the running track and trying to locate Esther among the dancers. Even as Dizzy spoke, he was there at her elbow, to their mutual surprise.
“I thought you were in bed!” he exclaimed, as he recognized his cousin.
“I thought you were studying.”
“I was studying when a telegram came, and now I’ve got to find Esther.”
He was introduced with great formality; Gwen and Clara immediately adopting the convention that they had not known of his existence in the same town.
“Esther was in one of the boxes a while ago,” said Gwen. “No. 18.”
Grasping at this, Tommy turned to Dizzy.
“Then I wonder if you’d mind going over and giving her this telegram?”
“I would so mind,” said Dizzy. “Why don’t you give it to her yourself? We’re not supposed to be here.”
“Neither am I; they let me in. But I can’t just walk across there all by myself, and you can,” he said earnestly.
Gwen had been looking at him in a curiously intent way for some moments. He was not
