Yanci was an exquisite little beauty. With a sort of conscious sensuality surprising in such a young man—Scott was only twenty-five—he avoided an introduction that he might watch her undisturbed for a fanciful hour, and sip the pleasure or the disillusion of her conversation at the drowsy end of the evening.
“She never got over the disappointment of not meeting the Prince of Wales when he was in this country,” remarked Mrs. Orrin Rogers, following his gaze. “She said so, anyhow; whether she was serious or not I don’t know. I hear that she has her walls simply plastered with pictures of him.”
“Who?” asked Scott suddenly.
“Why, the Prince of Wales.”
“Who has plaster pictures of him?”
“Why, Yanci Bowman, the girl you said you thought was so pretty.”
“After a certain degree of prettiness, one pretty girl is as pretty as another,” said Scott argumentatively.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Mrs. Rogers’ voice drifted off on an indefinite note. She had never in her life compassed a generality until it had fallen familiarly on her ear from constant repetition.
“Let’s talk her over,” Scott suggested.
With a mock reproachful smile Mrs. Rogers lent herself agreeably to slander. An encore was just beginning. The orchestra trickled a light overflow of music into the pleasant green-latticed room and the two score couples who for the evening comprised the local younger set moved placidly into time with its beat. Only a few apathetic stags gathered one by one in the doorways, and to a close observer it was apparent that the scene did not attain the gayety which was its aspiration. These girls and men had known each other from childhood; and though there were marriages incipient upon the floor tonight, they were marriages of environment, of resignation, or even of boredom.
Their trappings lacked the sparkle of the seventeen-year-old affairs that took place through the short and radiant holidays. On such occasions as this, thought Scott as his eyes still sought casually for Yanci, occurred the matings of the left-overs, the plainer, the duller, the poorer of the social world; matings actuated by the same urge toward perhaps a more glamorous destiny, yet, for all that, less beautiful and less young. Scott himself was feeling very old.
But there was one face in the crowd to which his generalization did not apply. When his eyes found Yanci Bowman among the dancers he felt much younger. She was the incarnation of all in which the dance failed—graceful youth, arrogant, languid freshness and beauty that was sad and perishable as a memory in a dream. Her partner, a young man with one of those fresh red complexions ribbed with white streaks, as though he had been slapped on a cold day, did not appear to be holding her interest, and her glance fell here and there upon a group, a face, a garment, with a far-away and oblivious melancholy.
“Dark-blue eyes,” said Scott to Mrs. Rogers. “I don’t know that they mean anything except that they’re beautiful, but that nose and upper lip and chin are certainly aristocratic—if there is any such thing,” he added apologetically.
“Oh, she’s very aristocratic,” agreed Mrs. Rogers. “Her grandfather was a senator or governor or something in one of the Southern states. Her father’s very aristocratic-looking too. Oh, yes, they’re very aristocratic; they’re aristocratic people.”
“She looks lazy.”
Scott was watching the yellow gown drift and submerge among the dancers.
“She doesn’t like to move. It’s a wonder she dances so well. Is she engaged? Who is the man who keeps cutting in on her, the one who tucks his tie under his collar so rakishly and affects the remarkable slanting pockets?”
He was annoyed at the young man’s persistence, and his sarcasm lacked the ring of detachment.
“Oh, that’s”—Mrs. Rogers bent forward, the tip of her tongue just visible between her lips—“that’s the O’Rourke boy. He’s quite devoted, I believe.”
“I believe,” Scott said suddenly, “that I’ll get you to introduce me if she’s near when the music stops.”
They arose and stood looking for Yanci—Mrs. Rogers, small, stoutening, nervous, and Scott Kimberly, her husband’s cousin, dark and just below medium height. Scott was an orphan with half a million of his own, and he was in this city for no more reason than that he had missed a train. They looked for several minutes, and in vain. Yanci, in her yellow dress, no longer moved with slow loveliness among the dancers.
The clock stood at half past ten.
II
“Good evening,” her father was saying to her at that moment in syllables faintly slurred. “This seems to be getting to be a habit.”
They were standing near a side stairs, and over his shoulder through a glass door Yanci could see a party of half a dozen men sitting in familiar joviality about a round table.
“Don’t you want to come out and watch for awhile?” she suggested, smiling and affecting a casualness she did not feel.
“Not tonight, thanks.”
Her father’s dignity was a bit too emphasized to be convincing.
“Just come out and take a look,” she urged him. “Everybody’s here, and I want to ask you what you think of somebody.”
This was not so good, but it was the best that occurred to her.
“I doubt very strongly if I’d find anything to interest me out there,” said Tom Bowman emphatically. “I observe that f’some insane reason I’m always taken out and aged on the wood for half an hour as though I was irresponsible.”
“I only ask you to stay a little while.”
“Very considerate, I’m sure. But tonight I happ’n be interested in a discussion that’s taking place in here.”
“Come on, Father.”
Yanci put her arm through his ingratiatingly; but he released it by the simple expedient of raising his own arm and letting hers drop.
“I’m afraid not.”
“I’ll tell you,” she suggested lightly, concealing her annoyance at this unusually protracted argument, “you come in and look, just once, and then if it bores you you can go right back.”
He shook his head.
“No thanks.”
Then without another word he turned suddenly and reentered the bar. Yanci went back to the ballroom. She glanced easily at the stag line as she passed, and making a quick selection murmured to a man near her, “Dance with me, will you, Carty? I’ve lost my partner.”
“Glad to,” answered Carty truthfully.
“Awfully sweet of you.”
“Sweet of me? Of you, you mean.”
She looked up at him absently. She was furiously annoyed at her father. Next morning at breakfast she would radiate a consuming chill, but for tonight she could only wait, hoping that if the worst happened he would at least remain in the bar until the dance was over.
Mrs. Rogers, who lived next door to the Bowmans, appeared suddenly at her elbow with a strange young man.
“Yanci,” Mrs. Rogers was saying with a social smile. “I want to introduce Mr. Kimberly. Mr. Kimberly’s spending the week-end with us, and I particularly wanted him to meet you.”
“How perfectly slick!” drawled Yanci with lazy formality.
Mr. Kimberly suggested to Miss Bowman that they dance, to which proposal Miss Bowman dispassionately acquiesced. They mingled their arms in the gesture prevalent and stepped into time with the beat of the drum. Simultaneously it seemed to Scott that the room and the couples who danced up and down upon it converted themselves into a background behind her. The commonplace