When Carl had removed himself, they danced.
Then followed the conventional small-talk of two members of the warring sexes when both are engaged in “making an impression”. They both followed youth’s greatest diversion, staying in school the while dodging its exactions and embracing its pleasures, and acquiring not education, but the equally essential atmosphere. It developed that he was a junior, she in the final year of finishing school; that he played football, but had failed to win a letter (though he confessed with pardonable pride having played eight minutes in a Big Game when the first-string tackle had been carried off the field); that she adored football; that she likewise adored a number of things; dogs (but not the messy kind); fraternity pins, and Eastern men (this was a pardonable error; she made flattering concessions to the Southern variety, when Tommy found the opportunity to tell her where he came from); that she adored—a great many more things.
In short, they simply chattered, as a man and a girl have always done, on first meeting. Later stages of acquaintanceship bring long silences, either from undisguised boredom or an adolescent spiritual understanding. Now, silence was a gaping hole in the garment of etiquette, to be patched with endless talk.
They were soon cut in on.
Carl returned from the arduous task of dancing with his own sister (a task only to her brother; she, too, held court), and found Tommy marooned in the stag line. He introduced him to other girls, in whom Tommy found varying charm. Carl’s sister, a mature child of seventeen, wanted to know, “Honestly now,” whether Carl drank at school.
Tommy lied like a good roommate. He reflected philosophically on the oddness of sisters who went out constantly with men who drank, and yet expected total abstinence from their brothers. It was a reversal of the older custom of brothers who demanded impeccable behavior of their sisters; and yet—
Millicent passed. He cut-in. When they had danced half a dozen steps he lost her to another stag.
She was annoyed, and the pressure of her hand as they parted was a little more than casual artifice. Millicent had early finished her appraisal of the men at the party. She knew that she was destined to meet most of them night after night for the next two weeks, and she planned eventualities. She planned to have half a dozen affairs; the holiday-loves, more evanescent even than summer-loves, that dwindled, after the two weeks, from special-delivery letters into abrupt silence. There would be one or two proposals, perhaps, in the last days—there had been three, at the end of the summer at Minnetonka. She catalogued the men, slowly: Eddie Pearson, nice enough—too nice, insipid; Orme Waldon, whom no amount of snubbing would rebuff; Stewart Holmes, whose egotism was such that he believed all girls secretly longed for his attentions; and so on. These were the last three of the summer’s garnerings. She wanted some one new. Tommy Squire. He seemed worth thinking about. Rather wise—he’d need angling to draw in. Idly she planned manoeuvres.
Tommy cut-in again. She used the old effective artifice of asking him to keep her tiny handkerchief and vanity-case in his pocket. When she caught his eye, he was to understand that they were needed. Tommy smiled to himself. He understood.
But Millicent did not need to use her vanity-case very often. Tommy kept on cutting-in. However, his manner was not gratifying. He was pleasant, impersonal, quizzical. He told her that she was rather the most attractive girl there—and added, thoughtfully, that there were lots more beautiful girls, in Richmond.