Had America, Maria Angelina wondered, been like this in her mother's youth? Was it from such speeches that her mother had turned, in helplessness or distaste, to the delicate implications, the finished innuendo of the Italian world?
Or had times changed? Were these girls truly different from their mothers? Was it a new society?
That was it, she concluded, and she, in her old-world seclusion, was of another era from these assured ones. . . . Again, for a moment the doubt of her capacity to cope with these times assailed her, but only for a moment, for next instant she caught Johnny Byrd's upturned glance from the floor below and in its flash of admiration, as unstinted as a sun bath, her confidence drew reanimation.
Later, she found that same warmth in other men's eyes and in the eagerness with which they kept cutting in.
That cutting in, itself, was strange to her. It filled her with a terrifying perspective of what would happen if she were not cut in upon—if she were left to gyrate endlessly in the arms of some luckless one, eternally stuck. . . .
At home, at a ball, she knew that there were fixed dances, and programs, in which engagements were jotted definitely down, and at each dance's end a girl was returned respectfully to her chaperon where the next partner called for her. Often she had scanned Lucia's scrawled programs for the names there.
But none of that now.
Up and down the hall she sped in some man's arms, round and round, up and down, until another man, agile, dexterous, shot between the couples and claimed her. And then up and down again until some other man. . . . And sometimes they went back to rest in the intimately arranged chairs beneath the balcony, and sometimes stepped out of doors to saunter along a wide terrace.
It was incredibly independent. It was intoxicatingly free. It was also terrifyingly responsible.
And Maria Angelina, in her young fear of unpopularity, smiled so ingenuously upon each arrival, with a shy, backward deprecatory glance at her lost partner, that she stirred something new and wondering in each seasoned breast, and each dancer came again and again.