"You nice old fake—I don't care why you came as long as you're here. Everything's going to be wonderful to-night, I feel it in my bones."
"Perhaps it will be beyond me altogether."
"Never mind. I'll take care of you. Don't applaud on your own initiative and stop the moment I do."
"Oh, you're not going to be burdened with the responsibility. I've arranged to be tutored through this already."
"You have, have you? Well! So you were in the plot, too." Alice leaned to Jean again.
"Not exactly. I——"
"You're both as bad, one as the other. Manage it yourselves." The laugh was more a caress than a sound, as Alice turned to Sidney.
"Thanks." Jerome faced Jean, fully, for the first time, and then, almost instantly, picked up his program and began to study it carefully. For, in that passing glance, Jean had detached herself from the background of bright light, evening dress and subdued chatter into which his first general impression had plunged her, and stood apart, unfamiliar and strange. Jerome read the program through once, and then again, giving meticulous attention to each selection, but, as if there were a magnet beside him, the change in Jean kept drawing him away.
What was it? Jerome was used to the transformation of evening dress which he insisted reduced all women to a common denominator. But Jean was not at all reduced to a common denominator. Nor was she herself. She was and she wasn't, in an annoyingly confused fashion that made Jerome feel, if he kept his eyes long enough on the program, that Jean was exactly the same, except that she wore a low-cut light dress instead of the everyday high-cut dark one. But at his faintest move to verify this by a direct glance, she was somebody else altogether.
Jerome picked out certain numbers and considered these especially. He must turn and get this thing reduced to a phrase and so eliminate it. The concert would last for at least two hours and a half, and he could not sit there staring at his program and wondering why Jean Herrick was and wasn't Jean Herrick. He wanted to look at Jean, but he did not want Jean to look at him.