things, honestly you are! Dear, listen, your eyes will be all red for the party—" (a heaven-sent inspiration, this; the tears abated instantly). He had to lend her his handkerchief, because "Mine's just l-lace," and sit waiting while she repaired the ravages of grief with powder puff and rouge. "If it wouldn't ruin the whole evening," he thought, "I'd come straight out and tell her. No use trying to keep up a pretense, and I'm not going to do it much longer."
The junior promenade was in full cry when finally they reached the gymnasium, A typical college prom it was. Typical setting of fir boughs and potted palms, of banners and bunting, of Japanese lanterns and shifting searchlights, of polished floor with an orchestra on a raised dais at each end, of booths marked with the letters of twenty fraternities where chaperones sat yawning behind their feather fans. And a typical scene. Gowns of scarlet and green and orange and turquoise and cloth-of-gold, sophisticated gowns, blasé gowns, wise, knowing, faintly wicked gowns. Swirl of rainbow colors streaked with black. Curve of white arms across dark shoulders. Faces close together. Slim girl-bodies swaying backward from the hips. Stag-line in the middle of the hall, a thick wall opening to receive, to give back, elbowing itself, craning its neck, squirming, never still. Whisper of a thousand pairs of shoes along the floor. Croon of jazz. Blended odor of flowers and whiskey and perfume and soap and cigarettes and damp powder and brilliantine—the typical odor, the twentieth century odor.
Someone cut in on Molly before she and Jock had danced half the length of the gym, and Jock, thus freed, joined the stag-line. Here bits of sentences were flying about like missiles. "One in the yellow dress" . . . "and I said" . . . "oiled to the eyes"
