'It's the same thing,' she laughed back, 'it's like wings or running water—always going wherever they are——
And was dancing to and fro over the carpet, when the door opened and in came her brother Tom, followed by another youth.
He looked surprised, ashamed, then vexed. It was Saturday afternoon. He had been six months now in the office.
'I've brought Mr. Halliday with me,' he said pompously, 'to have tea. We've just been to a matinée at the Coliseum. Joan, this is Mr. Halliday, our junior clerk. My sister, Harold.'
Joan instantly looked gauche and ugly. She shook hands with a speckled youth, whose shy want of manners did not prevent his eyeing her all over. He sat down beside his friend, talking of the singing, dancing, juggling and so on that they had witnessed. All the time he talked at something else in her. But she hid it away as cleverly as a bird hides its nest. The callow youth, without realising it, was hunting for a nest. In the country he might have found it. He would have been sunburned, for one thing, instead of speckled. The wind, the rain, the starlight would have guided him. His natural instinct would have flowed out in a dance of spontaneous running movement, easy, graceful, clean. Here, however, it seemed rigid, ugly, diseased. He was living the life of others.
'You were dancing just as we came in,' observed Mr. Halliday. 'Does that line of things attract you? You are going on the stage, perhaps?'
Joan looked past him out of the window, and saw the swallows flashing about the sky.
'I can dance,' she replied, 'but not on a stage.'
'But you'd be a great success, I think, from what I saw,' opined the junior clerk. And somehow he said it unpleasantly. His tone half undressed her.