As she hesitated he muttered, “Do you know what I want?” He leaned nearer. “I want the whole evening, as we used—all of ’em!”
“Oh, only that!” she fairly laughed at him.
“This isn’t Vienna,” she said as she turned away with Thair, but her negation sounded like a promise. She left him—Longacre, who habitually loafed out a ball,—with a desire to dance—to dance wildly, madly, with any one!
Safely and slowly steered around the room in Thair’s practised arm, Florence saw him whirling recklessly through the crowd, dancing double time in fine Viennese fashion, twice as fast as the rhythmic swing of the room, with Julia Budd a half-alarmed, half-angry, wholly excited partner. She seemed holding back, objecting; he was urging her on, domineering. He swept her along against her will.
“Oh, no, no; you don’t want to stop!” Florence heard him laugh as he dashed past. And, catching glimpses of Julia’s face as she was whirled along, Florence thought it struggled with a desire, and an inability, to be angry; a confused pleasure in a will stronger than her own.
Mrs. Budd was making covert attempts to attract her daughter’s attention. Her expression said that Longacre was proving himself all and more than “queer” included. “Conspicuousness” was her abomination, and there was no doubt that Fox Longacre was making Julia conspicuous.
To Florence it was equally plain that he did not know it. The situation opened before her like a tableau, the climax of the play. She saw Fox and Julia in their excited gyration, not as she had seen them that morning in the garden, but in discord, in different planets of feeling, the girl supremely agitated, Longacre elated. What was the origin of that elation? Florence asked herself. A look of hers—a waft of memory! If she missed the significance of the girl’s face, the danger it threatened, it was that she lost it in the tumult of her own feeling.
A word, and she would have been whirling in Julia’s place. Still looking at Julia, she blamed herself for holding him off so long. The girl’s mere proximity was peril. That was enough to keep any man beside her all the evening. She had more than beauty. She was magnetic. She sunk the women around her to nonentities.
Florence watched Longacre shouldering Julia a passage through the press in the direction of Mrs. Budd’s disapproval. He stood a moment talking with the mother and daughter; and as the girl turned her long throat, and bent her black brows upon him, the woman thought, “Of course he will stay. At least he will stay out the interval.” He seemed to hesitate, but turned presently and walked on to another group, said a word there, started across the room.
Unconsciously Florence straightened herself. What irrelevant thing she said to Thair she didn’t know. She heard him laugh. She was thinking: