“Then we’ll come in—I can see in the dark better than any other way,” and one by one the three climbed from the car. The freckled faced girl turned to him with a sudden, grandiloquent sweep. “Thank you very much for the use of your car, sir. I shall mention you favourably in my next letter to the Transcript.”
The three were gone, and the freshman, after a bewildered grunt, drove off to the Copley, where a party of his own kind awaited him. Not for him as yet the Tech fraternity dances.
As they entered the hall, Joy caught her breath. Never before had she seen such a spectacle. Three wide rooms were given up to dancing—the orchestra playing in the hall—sole illumination, the dim one that filtered from the hall into two of the rooms, and as for the third, it remained in blackness relieved only by ghostly dresses clasped to white shirtfronts. The three stared from the doorway for a moment of silent fascination. It was like some hazy, voluptuous dream—feverish music, quickening the throbbing of desire—the little sigh of figures interlocked, moving in time to the throb, in the dripping black velvet of the dark. It was something one might have imagined in the days of Nebuchadnezzar.
“Barbaric,” Joy murmured as she caught Jim’s eye and knew she was flushing—flushing under the music, which quickened the uneven pulse of memory.
“No—not barbaric,” said Jim. “Barbarians are—more direct.” He turned to Jerry. “Do you see them yet?” She shook her head, eyes straining after the dancers. “That freshman had no initiative. He ought to have——” He strode over to the orchestra, spoke to the boy at the piano. A few more bars, and the music stopped, the pianist tapping on the drum for quiet.
“I am asked to announce,” he said shrilly, “that Mr. Barnes and Mr. Harris are wanted in the hall.”
The music took up its beat, and the dancers in the dark, who had barely stopped, began again.
“I should have thought of paging them, only I’m so rattled,” said Jerry. “Thank God for Jim.”
He came back to them; through another opening into the hall charged two lads with question and not much else on their wide young faces. Jerry stepped forward and spread her fan in front of them, an excellent substitute for buttonholing, as they drew up with a start.
“Hullo, Jerry,” said one. The other said nothing; he was presumably Dum-Dum.