Kedzie followed the sound of the music. The lobbies were thronged with brilliant crowds flocking from theaters for supper and a dance. Kedzie made her way to the edge of the supper-room. The floor, like a pool surrounded by chairs and tables, was alive with couples dancing contentedly. Every woman was in evening dress and so was every man. The splendor of the costumes made her blink. The shabbiness of her own made her blush.
She blushed because her own dress was indecent and immoral. It was indecent and immoral because it was unlike that of the majority. In this parish, conventionality, which is the one true synonym for morality, called for bare shoulders and arms unsleeved. Kedzie was conspicuous, which is a perfect synonym for immoral. If she had fallen through the ceiling out of a bathtub she could not have felt more in need of a hiding-place. She shrank into a corner and sought cover and concealment, for she was afraid to go back to the elevator through the ceaseless inflow of the décolletées.
She throbbed to the music of the big band; her feet burned to dance; her waist ached for the sash of a manly arm. She knew that she could dance better than some of those stodgy old men and block-bodied old women. But she had no clothes on—for dancing.
But there was one woman whom Kedzie felt she could not surpass, a dazzling woman with a recklessly graceful young man. The young man took the woman from a table almost over Kedzie's head. They left at the table a man in evening dress who smoked a big cigar and seemed not to be jealous of the two dancers.
Some one among the spectators about Kedzie said that the woman was Zada L'Etoile, and her partner was Haviland Devoe. Zada was amazing in her postures and gyrations, but Kedzie thought that she herself could have danced as well if she had had that music, that costume, that partner, and a little practice.
When Zada had completed her calisthenics she did not sit down with Mr. Devoe, but went back to the table where the lone smoker sat. Now that she looked at him again, Kedzie thought what an extraordinarily handsome, gloriously wicked-looking, swell-looking man he was. Yet the girl who had danced called him Peterkin—which didn't sound very swell to Kedzie.
He had very little to say to Zada, who did most of the talking. He smiled at her now and then behind his cigar and gave her a queer look that Kedzie only vaguely understood. She thought little of him, though, because the next dance began, and she had a whole riot of costumes to study.
There was a constant movement of new-comers past Kedzie's nook. Sometimes people halted to look the crowd over before they went up the steps, and asked two handsome gentlemen in full-dress suits if they could have a table. The gentlemen—managers, probably, who got up the party—usually said no. Sometimes they looked at papers in their hands and marked off something, and then the people got a table.
By and by two men and an elderly woman dressed like a very youngerly woman paused near Kedzie. Both of the men were tall, but the one called Jim was so tall he could see over the rail, or over the moon, for all Kedzie knew.
The elderly lady said, “Come along, boys; we're missing a love of a trot.”