While he danced into his trousers his eyes were caught by head-lines on the paper folded at his plate:
"Mayor puts Lid on Thés Dansants."
Forbes seized the paper, flung himself into a chair, and read with violence the dire news that the same mayor who had ordered people to quit dancing at one now ordered them not to begin dancing before dinner. He grew hot with rage, while his coffee cooled and his rolls brittled. He had found the dancing-tea a delightful institution, a joyous democracy. But, according to the scathing indictment of the mayor and the adroit wording of the reporters, the tea-dance was a home-wrecking, youth-defiling abomination, only the more dreadful because it wrought its hellish purposes in the broad daylight.
According to the newspaper account of a typical dancing-tea, it was apparent that Forbes had failed to grasp the depravity of the crowd he had been dancing with; it seemed that the women were all fat fiends pursuing immature school-girls, and the men all evil-eyed brokers whose corpulence alone was proof enough of their wickedness.
Forbes stared aghast at a wholesale condemnation that must include Mrs. Neff, Persis, Winifred, Alice, and the respectable rest. He had not yet learned that certain journalists are mere newsboys always beating out of their dreadnaught typewriters cries of "Extra! Extra! All about the turrible moider!"
Forbes was dumfounded to learn that the modern Babylon plus Nineveh, New York, could be sent to bed at one o'clock and forbidden to dance by daylight. Ordinarily nothing on earth would have mattered less to Forbes than the fate of tea-dances. But this ukase drove him further than ever from his Persis.
The curious mania for public dancing had enabled him, though come to town a stranger, to join immediately in festival relations with people to whose homes he would normally have been months in penetrating. The mayor's edict revoked this democracy, and he was once more a stranger in the city. He must meet his new-found friends formally and at long intervals, if at all. He thanked his stars that he had arranged to give the luncheon in time. He must set about ordering it at once, and he must see to it that there was no flaw in its perfection.
CHAPTER XXIV
ON his way to the Ritz-Carlton, Forbes stopped at his bank to draw some money. He decided that he would better take along a hundred dollars. It would look impressive when he paid the waiter. He realized that it would drag his bank-account below the acceptable minimum. But he set his teeth and determined to do the thing right if he bankrupted the government. He would probably need most of the rest of the hundred before the week was out. He could begin to save again when he was in his uniform again.