He was turkey-trotting with Persis Cabot! He wanted everybody to know it. This thought alone gave him the braggadocio necessary to success.
Perhaps he was too busy thinking of his feet, perhaps the dance really was not indecent; but certainly his thoughts of her were as chivalrous as any knight's kneeling before his queen.
And yet they were gripping one another close; they were almost one flesh; their thoughts were so harmonious that she seemed to follow even before he led. She prophesied his next impulse and coincided with it.
They moved like a single being, a four-legged—no, not a four, but a two-legged angel, for his right foot was wedded close to her left, and her left to his right.
And so they ambled with a foolish, teetering, sliding hilarity. So they spun round and round with knees clamped together. So they seesawed with thighs crossed X-wise, all intermingled and merged together. And now what had seemed odious as a spectacle was only a sane and youthful frivolity, an April response to the joy of life, the glory of motion. David dancing before the Lord could not have had a cleaner mind, though his wife, too, contemned and despised him, and for her contempt won the punishment of indignant God.
Abruptly, and all too soon, the music stopped. The dancers applauded hungrily, and the band took up the last strains again. Again Forbes caught Persis to him, and they reveled till the music repeated its final crash.
Then they stood in mutual embrace for an instant that seemed a long time to him. He ignored the other couples dispersing to their tables to resume their interrupted feasts.
He was bemused with a startled unbelief. How marvelous it was that he should be here with her! He had come to the city a stranger, forlorn with loneliness, at noonday. And at noon of night he was already embracing this wonderful one and she him, as if they were plighted lovers.