Just at first he didn’t seem to remember, but in an instant he chivalrously remembered it all with the utmost vividness. They discussed the curious little coincidence. It was quite wonderful. Her romantic nature made the lavish most of a circumstance which to another might seem casual in the extreme. Such things really happen pretty often, but her mood insisted upon the most rosy values; and indeed, the tiny episode, from the moment he did remember, seemed to carry them swiftly along toward an intimacy undreamed of a moment since.
He looked at her, she felt, almost consumingly with his magnetic round blue eyes.
Presently he asked whether she wouldn’t like some punch, and she said she would, so they got up and he gave her his worldly arm. She had never before been so satisfyingly thrilled.
Mr. King handed her a glass of punch, making a minute ceremony of it; and she fluttered again, and smiled across at him quite archly over the rim as she sipped.
He asked her: “I suppose you spend about all your time dancing, Miss Meade? It seems to be the rage nowadays.”
And while she ought, of course, to have laughed it off, or been at least flirtingly evasive, she looked at him instead with an impulse of wistfulness out of her meagre life, and a wave of unassuming candour brought out the admission: “I really don’t very much, but I enjoy it immensely. Don’t you think this is a very nice party?”
He seemed to regard her with subtly keener interest; and, curiously enough, it was just that impulsive little flash of candour in Stella, to begin with, that stimulated in Mr. King a sentiment destined at last to involve her most surprisingly. She had a very definite picture, however, of the sort of impression she wanted to make on this man—the impression he seemed irresistibly to invite—and it would have bewildered her to think he might be getting another picture altogether.
He asked her if she wouldn’t like to dance, and without even glancing at her card she said yes she would; and then half wished she had said no, because she was hazy about the new steps, and was desperately afraid Mr. King would find her, after all, disappointing.
But they danced, and everything went splendidly, and he didn’t find her so disappointing, although himself so immaculately proficient in the new steps.