She had a dry Martini and I had tomato juice. Then I asked her and we danced a couple of fox trots. She was a little bit nervous for a minute or so and presently she wasn't. I asked the trio for a bolero; the two other couples quit; and we danced alone. Afterward we danced to a piece called "Cu-Gu-Tu-Ru" which is also known as "Jack-Jack." She understood, technically, about dancing the rumba and she gave some indication of feelings for the part that is more instinctive than planned. Once or twice she tried to lead me—without being aware of it.
If you know a good deal about dancing, you can tell a good deal about girls that you'd be a long time in learning by any other means. People are animals—and dancing among animals is several hundred million years older than the species that calls itself Homo sapiens. There was rhythm on the planet long before there were ballrooms. So you can expect vestiges, at least, in woman-the-animal, of impulses which belong to the skeleton, muscles, and nerves and not to society—vestiges specifically interpreted, disciplined or repressed by the individual in your arms. The woman's dancing says, This is what the world has done to me—or hasn't. And it is the same for men—which is why women, who live closer to their instincts, like to dance.
This circumstance, alas, has for so long been repudiated by our forebears that the dancing of most American males is rude and boorish and clumsy, at once self-assertive and self-conscious, unimaginative, disrhythmic, unsubtle—paranoid. It is what the world has done to them.
You can talk to a woman all night and persuade her of nothing.
You can hold her hand and a chemical change will take place in her.
You can kiss her in certain ways and the Old Memories will do what rhetoric cannot.
And you can dance with her.
If you can dance.
You can dance by fox trot, the American way, the integration of surfaces. We know the same steps, the same skills, the same beat. We look well together. We make a matched pair. The thresholds of our sentiments mesh, dovetail, tongue-and-groove. We are, indeed, in the groove.
You can use the dance of conquest and gradual assent, the tango.