Henry with significance designed to be highly obvious. "Permit me," he said, and took the fan, feeling a most absurd impulse to caress her white chin with its curled velvety ends quite as she had been doing unconsciously when he came up. His nerves were all bounding; he was filled with a primitive exuberance. The dance was still on, the party was at its gayest but she had left them all to seek him. He felt boyish and irrepressible, likely to do any absurd thing. But he restrained that impulse about the fan.
"May I have the next dance?" he asked eagerly.
"And it's the very last," Miss Billie nodded, smiling benignly as a queen confers a favor. "Mother is sending the orchestra home early to protect my delicate constitution. I've been saving it for you because I felt father was taking an unfair advantage."
This sounded all so very delightful that Henry wasn't quite sure it wasn't a dream; yet knew that it was not for he was experiencing very real sensations as he took Miss Boland in his arms for the dance, real but rather unusual—feelings of reverence, feelings that he took hold of something immensely precious but immensely fragile. This sense of fragileness passed with the first contact of her supple body. She was not only a thing alive; she was strong; she stepped through the measures, the eccentric starts and stops, the gaits and gallops, of the modern dance with an elastic lightness which told its own story of perfect health and athletic vigor.
She was warmly radiant, disingenuously friendly and spontaneously happy. She was wonderful, she was glorious; but she was also mysterious. And he held all this mystery in his arms, close to him, rhythmic and
