After a month of whiles, they walked slowly up the beach. Their conversation was incoherent, but adequate.
“The dance will be almost over—what does it matter to us—isn’t it all strange and wonderful—your mother will think we were drowned——”
They came into the club house with unmistakably luminous faces. There is something about young love that stands starkly revealed, and they were as patent as if they had been hung with sandwich-man signs.
At times life seems to move in a quick succession of scenes until the scenes begin to seem unreal, and one feels apart from the drama of events, watching impersonally while life plays on with oneself. So Joy felt, as she saw Packy at the far corner of the room, and so she watched with impartial interest as he looked at them, first carelessly, then in swift incredulity, then with a face that grew thunderous, as, hands in pockets, he strode across to where they were about to join the dancers.
“Hello, Joy,” he said shortly. “Doesn’t take you a long time to change running mates, does it?”
“My goodness, look at Packy, entirely surrounded by a frown,” she tossed back at him—how easily Jerry’s line came to one’s lips.
“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded, blocking their way as they started again to join the dancers.
Joy remembered a saying of Jerry’s which seemed peculiarly pat at this moment: “A girl never has the right amount of men. If she has few, it’s boring; if she has many, they get in the way and cramp her style.” She laughed. Packy was really a grotesque figure, with his glowering face and childish remarks. “You make me feel like a dancing school, with all this talk of changing partners,” she observed, and turned to Grant. She was amazed at the transformation. Grant’s lips were drawn back over his teeth, his eyes glittering.
“Would you mind stating what business it is of yours, who Joy goes to a dance with?” he asked, in a voice as chill and cold as Mrs. Grey’s herself; a voice with the ring of generations of Boston ancestors behind it.
It was the end of the dance; and Joy now realized, in a sort of detached horror, that they were becoming conspicuous. Grant and Packy were facing each other in the same tense, bristly pose that dogs assume before a pitched battle; faces were turning their way; she could see Mrs. Grey rising, in impotent protest, across the room——