Patricia might have considered herself a third; but she did not do this.
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During the rest of the evening the relation between Harry and Patricia, although it was gay and friendly, never quite recovered the fluency it had attained during dinner. They danced together; but Patricia, warned by what she had seen, shunned anything more cordial than the merest partnership in the dance. Harry tried to hold her more closely, but he found that it was at the cost of enjoyable dancing, and he therefore abandoned the attempt. He discovered that Patricia, while she was as agreeable as ever, had no intention of letting him make love to her. It was contrary to his practice to explain or to apologise, and he did not refer to Bella. Patricia, upon her side, showed no disposition to forsake or despise the interloping party; and so gradually the two of them drifted apart. She danced with two or three of the other men, and he with Bella and another girl. The noise of the room, and the crowd of people, seemed to increase. It became late. The party showed signs of an inclination for the evening's end. Drinks had long been done with; new arrivals, fresher and more eager than those who had been dancing for some time, took the floor. The evening was collapsing. Quite definitely it was petering out. At a quarter-to-twelve there was a signal for closing the place; and then, as part of a general shoal of departing merry-makers, a very sleepy party pressed out into the night air. Monty and Blanche had left long before.
As they thus emerged, Patricia, in evading Harry's attempt at segregation, found herself with two of the other girls, who both said they lived at Chelsea. The journey homeward was therefore made in a crowd, which separated Harry and Patricia. They all came to the end of the street in which Patricia lived, and then to the house itself; so that she was not for an instant alone with Harry. Even at the parting, he was but the last of the group to bid farewell, and she walked slowly upstairs to her rooms with cheery voices still ringing in her ears.
CHAPTER SEVEN: SECOND EVENING
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From that evening Patricia had no lack of companionship. She had fallen into a whole group of new friends and new Christian names. There was no end to the Dorises, the Bills, the Owens, the Hildas, and the Normans whom she met at every dance and every party. She sat on floors and talked with assurance; she danced with a score of men. During the daytime she did more dress-making than bread-work. In the evenings, carried away by the sense of new experience and new power, she added a veneer of alluring sophistication to her nature. Never had the face of life been so quickly altered.
At first it seemed to Patricia that these young men and women whom she now so constantly met belonged to a different species from herself. She had been brought up in a suburban atmosphere in which anything not perfectly respectable was done in secret. It had been a disagreeable atmosphere to her, because she was both impetuous and innocent, a combination of characteristics which always raises trouble for the owner. Regarding herself as a free spirit, she had received rebuffs from those more strict; and her candour had given rise to wrong impressions about herself in her own mind as well as in the minds of others. She had supposed that Patricia alone was in a state of rebellion against suburban laws. She had even exaggerated her own importance as a rebel. Now she found that these laws did not apply; and that in fact defiance of them was unnecessary. The young people of her fresh pleasure did not defy: they had forgotten. She became aware of a whole new code. A free spirit she still felt herself; but one in a world of free spirits. Along with the exaggerated sense of her own personality common to clever girls of our day she had also the good sense to realise the improvement in her own circumstances. Patricia rejoiced. She delighted in the feeling of wide acquaintance, of new liberty. It pleased her to meet cordial young people who were no cleverer and no more concerned with strait-laced morals than herself and whom she did not despise. She began at last to feel at home. They were young, free-and-easy, less mentally ingenious than she was, admiring, unaffected. It was as though she belonged to the same family as themselves, but was of a naturally brighter plumage. Her vanity was sensibly fortified.