He had casually said to the others, a week before, that he knew only the square dances which, as a boy, he had learned at parties at Parthenon. But they had reassured him: “Oh, come on—we’ll teach you how to dance at the ball—it won’t be formal. Besides, we’ll give you some lessons before we go.” Playwriting and playing Five Hundred had prevented their giving him the lessons. So he now sat terrified as a two-step began and he saw what seemed to be thousands of glittering youths and maidens whirling deftly in a most involved course, getting themselves past each other in a way which he was sure he could never imitate. The orchestra yearned over music as rich and smooth as milk chocolate, which made him intensely lonely for Nelly, though she was only across the room from him.
Tom Poppins immediately introduced Nelly to a facetious cigar salesman, who introduced her to three of the beaux in evening clothes, while Tom led out Mrs. Arty. Mr. Wrenn, sitting in a row of persons who were not at all interested in his sorrows, glowered out across the hall, and wished, oh! so bitterly, to flee home. Nelly came up, glowing, laughing, with black-mustached and pearl-waistcoated men, and introduced him to them, but he glanced at them disapprovingly; and always she was carried off to dance again.
She found and hopefully introduced to Mr. Wrenn a wallflower who came from Yonkers and had never heard of Tom Poppins or aeroplanes or Oxford or any other topic upon which Mr. Wrenn uneasily tried to discourse as he watched Nelly waltz and smile up at her partners. Presently the two sat silent. The wallflower excused herself and went back to her mama from Yonkers.
Mr. Wrenn sat sulking, hating his friends for having brought him, hating the sweetness of Nelly Croubel, and saying to himself, “Oh—sure—she dances with all those other men—me, I’m only the poor fool that talks to her when she’s tired and tries to cheer her up.”
He did not answer when Tom came and told him a new story he had just heard in the barroom.
Once Nelly landed beside him and bubblingly insisted on his coming out and trying to learn to dance. He brightened, but shyly remarked, “Oh no, I don’t think I’d better.” Just then the blackest-mustached and pearl-waistcoatedest of all the cigar salesmen came begging for a dance, and she was gone, with only: “Now get up your courage. I’m going to make you dance.”
At the intermission he watched her cross the floor with the hateful cigar salesman, slender in her tight crisp new white mull, flourishing her fan and talking with happy rapidity. She sat down beside him. He said nothing; he still stared out across the glassy floor. She peeped at him curiously several times, and made a low tapping with her fan on the side of her chair.
She sighed a little. Cautiously, but very casually, she said, “Aren’t you going to take me out for some refreshments, Mr. Wrenn?”
“Oh sure—I’m good enough to buy refreshments for her!” he said to himself.
Poor Mr. Wrenn; he had not gone to enough parties in Parthenon, and he hadn’t gone to any in New York. At nearly forty he was just learning the drab sulkiness and churlishness and black jealousy of the lover…. To her: “Why didn’t you go out with that guy with the black mustache?” He still stared straight ahead.