“I wish you’d tell me about Nancy,” Caroline said. “It makes a lot of difference. You haven’t any idea how much difference it makes.”
“See the nice little brown pots with the soup in them,” Billy implored her. “Cheese, too, all grated up so fine and white. Sprinkle it in like little snow-flakes.”
But in spite of all Billy’s efforts the evening went wrong after that. Caroline was wrapped in a mantle of sorrowful meditation the opacity of which she was not willing to let Billy penetrate for a moment. After they had dined they took a taxi-cab up-town and danced for an hour on the smooth floor of one of the quieter hotels. Billy’s dancing being of that light, sure, rhythmic quality that should have installed him irrevocably in the regard of any girl who had ever danced with a man who performed less admirably. Caroline liked to dance and fell in step with an unexpected docility, but even in his arms, dipping, pivoting, swaying to the curious syncopation of modern dance time, she was as remote and cool as a snow maiden.
At the table on the edge of the dancing platform where they sat between dances, Billy pledged her in nineteen-four Chablis Mouton.
“This is what you look like,” he said, holding up his glass to the light, “or perhaps I ought to say what you act like,—clear, cold stuff,—lovely, but not very sweet.”
“If it’s Dick,”—Caroline refused to be diverted—“Nancy is merely taking the easiest way out. Just getting married because she hasn’t the courage to go through any other way. She and Dick have hardly a taste in common—they don’t even read the same books.”
“What difference does that make?”
“If you don’t know I can’t tell you. When you see somebody else in danger of following the same course of action that you, yourself, are pursuing,” she added cryptically, “it puts a new face on your own affairs.”
“Oh! let’s get out of here,” Billy said, signaling for his check.