An arc light on the porte-cochère of the clubhouse picked them out of the darkness as they approached. By its glare, Molly was revealed as daintily blonde, and Jock
He was tall. And he moved as some tall people do with a leisurely loose-jointed grace. You could imagine that he danced well. In fact you could imagine that he did most things well—there was a jauntiness and an assurance about him that told you so. His shapely head was set arrogantly on big shoulders, and he had sleek black hair, brown eyes, a straight, short nose, and a mouth that slanted up at one corner lopsidedly when he smiled. Everything about him fitted everything else except that mouth. It was a sensitive, artistic, dreamy sort of mouth. It belonged to the boy Jock Hamill was really, but it did not in the least belong to the boy he requested the world to believe that he was.
"Darn!" said Molly suddenly.
She had paused below the arc light and was peering at such atom of her countenance as a vanity-mirror the size of a quarter reflected. "Look at me!" she continued. "I'm a wreck. I'll have to run around to the lockers and fix up a little, Jock, or everybody'll know where I've been. You go on in and wait for me."
Inside, in the club's spacious living room, it was dim and shadowy again. There were frosted electric bulbs around the walls, but they shed no illumination; merely bit orange holes into the curtain of gloom. The dancers were a close-packed huddle, swaying now this way, now that, as if the floor were afloat on ocean waves that rocked it just a little. Jazz beat against the eardrums . . . the blood . . . everyone, everything, moved to its beating . . .
One Benny Webber, a fat youth faintly redolent of gin, came and paused beside Jock in the doorway.
