“I’ll see what I can do,” she speculated, looking at her dance card. “The next three are with total strangers, and of course I can’t touch those,” she laughed. “The fourth one is with Willis Cunningham, and after that is a brief wilderness again. I think one is all you get.”
“I’m lucky even to have that,” declared Allison in content. “The fourth dance down. That will just give me time to punish the buffet. I’m hungry as a bear. I started out here without my dinner.”
They stood at the balcony windows looking out into the wintry night. There was not much to see, not even the lacing of the bare trees against the clouded sky. The snow had gone, and where the light from the windows cut squarely on the ground were bare walks, and cold marble, and dead lawn; all else was blackness; but it was a sufficient landscape for people so intensely concentrated upon themselves.
Her next partner came in search of her presently, and the music struck up, and Allison, nodding to his many acquaintances jovially, for he was in excellent humour in these days of building, and planning, and clearing ground for an entirely new superstructure of life, circled around to the dining room, where he performed savage feats at the buffet. Soon he was out again, standing quietly at the edge of things, and watching Gail with keen pleasure, both when she danced and when, in the intermissions, the gallants of the party gravitated to her like needles to a magnet. Her popularity pleased him, and flattered him. Suddenly he caught sight of Eldridge Babbitt, a middle-aged man who was watching a young woman with the same pleasure Allison was experiencing in the contemplation of Gail.
“Just the man I wanted to see,” announced Allison, making his way to Babbitt. “I have a new freightage proposition for the National Dairy Products Consolidation.”
Babbitt brightened visibly. He had been missing something keenly these past two days, and now all at once he realised what it was; business.
“I can’t see any possible new angle,” returned Babbitt cautiously, and with a backward glance at the dashing young Mrs. Babbitt. He headed instinctively for the library.
Laughingly Gail finished her third dance down. She had enjoyed several sparkling encounters in passing with Dick Rodley, and she was buoyantly exhilarated as she started to stroll from the floor with her partner. She had wanted to find cherub-cheeked Marion Kenneth, and together they walked through the conservatory, and the dining room, and the deserted billiard room, with its bright light on the green cloth and all the rest of the room in dimness. There was a narrow space at one point between the chairs and the table, and it unexpectedly wedged them into close contact. With a sharp intake of his breath, the fellow, a ruddy-faced, thick-necked, full-lipped young man who had followed her with his eyes all evening, suddenly turned, and caught her in his embrace, and, holding back her head in the hollow of his arm, kissed her; a new kiss to her, and horrible!
Suddenly he released her, and stepped back abruptly, filled with remorse.
“Forgive me, Miss Sargent,” he begged.