"A tenement room with people everywhere and crying babies, no spot not filled with some human, crowding body. No coolness, no privacy, or this—for a few scorching weeks when you're young—and all the weary years afterwards to make up."
"Oh, please," Jerome begged with a quiver that would not stay under the forced laugh with which he tried to cover it, "don't delve down into the instincts of the whole race for this little job of ours. You make me feel as if we had undertaken to save humanity."
Jean was still looking toward the thin, rouged girl, drawn deeper into the shadow now. "But the instincts of the race are what we're after."
"Well, please stay on the surface a bit more or—you'll make me want to slip away to the Spice Islands too." He had not meant to say it, but if Jean heard she took no notice. The girl's hands were gripped in the boy's now as he drew her to him behind the bales. The next moment the band started and the girl came from behind the bales, rearranging her elaborately puffed hair and giggling as she passed.
The band crashed mechanically through its cheap selections, and was applauded dully, until the director hung up the fourth placard, announcing a waltz. Instantly a kind of shiver ran through the crowd. Boys and girls jumped to their feet, crushing each other in their haste, so that, before the band had played a dozen bars, a mass of moving bodies was gliding and swaying in the rising dust. Round and round they went, the dust rising thicker about them, the tapping of the girls' high heels and the shuffle of men's thick shoes drowning the ripple of the water on the piles beneath and the straining of the ship at her hawsers. The waltz ended but the dancers stood linked, furiously demanding an encore. The music began again. The settling dust rose in a fresh cloud. The girls relaxed in their partners' arms, and the boys held them hungrily as if, with the certainty of its short duration, they must wrest from this bodily contact every thrill concealed in it.
Jerome shifted in his chair. He wanted to get up and go back to the peace of the roof with Jean. He could not look at her and yet he wanted to make some comment, say something that would drag these close-locked bodies and gleaming eyes back to the level of a civic problem.
Again and again the band yielded in its indifference to what it played so long as it filled the requisite hours. The partners rarely changed, and again and again the thin girl and the ferret-eyed boy passed near, dancing a little apart from the others. Suddenly the boy said something, the girl tossed her head, jerked herself from his hold and came to sit down a few seats away. The boy's eyes were evil in their rage. He took a step toward the girl, stopped, shrugged his narrow shoulders and came directly over to Jean.
"Say, don't yuh wanter dance?"
Instinctively Jerome moved to interpose, but Jean was smiling up into the pimply face and bold eyes, defiant of inequality.
"But I can't dance, really, not a step."