Sophie smiled at Martha's happy seriousness. Arthur Henty was dancing with his wife. Sophie had not seen him so clearly since her return to the Ridge. When she had passed him in the township, or at Newton's, he had been riding, and she had scarcely seen his face for the beard which had overgrown it and the shadow his hat cast. She studied him with unmoved curiosity. His beard had been clipped close, and she recognised the moulding of his head, the slope of his shoulders, a peculiar loose litheness in his gait. Her eyes followed him as he danced with his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Henty were waltzing in the perfunctory, mechanical fashion of people thoroughly bored with each other.
Then Sophie swung with Potch into the eddying current of the dancers. Potch danced in as steady and methodical a fashion as he did everything. The music did not get him; at least, Sophie could not believe it did.
His eyes were deep and shining as though it were a great and holy ceremony he were engaged in, but there was no melting to the delight of rhythmic movement in his sober gyrations. Sophie felt him a clog on the flow of her own action as he steered and steadily directed her through the crowd.
"For goodness' sake, Potch, dance as if you meant it," she said.
"But I do mean it, Sophie," he said.
As he looked down at her, his flushed, happy face assured her that he did mean dancing, but he meant it as he meant everything—with a dead earnestness.
After that dance all her old friends among men of the Ridge came round Sophie to ask her to dance with them. Bully and Roy sparred for dances as they did in the old days, and Michael and George and Watty threatened to knock their heads together and throw them out of the room if they didn't get out of the way and give some other chaps a chance to dance with Sophie. Between the dances, Sophie went over to talk to Maggie Grant, Mrs. Watty, Mrs. George Woods, and Martha. She had time to tell Martha how nice her dress and the pink stockings looked, and how the opals in her bracelet flashed as she was dancing.
"You can see them from one end of the hall to the other," Sophie whispered.
"And you, lovey," Martha said. "It's just lovely, the dress. You should have seen how they stared at you when you came in.... And Potch looking so nice, too. He wouldn't call the King his uncle to-night, Sophie!"
Sophie laughed happily as she went off to dance with Bully, who was claiming her for a polka mazurka.