Mother's too—too tidy to dance."

"Well—this is different," murmured Heuston.

The floor had cleared as if by magic before the advance of a long slim pair: Lita Wyant and Tommy Ardwin. The decorator, tall and supple, had the conventional dancer's silhouette; but he was no more than a silhouette, a shadow on the wall. All the light and music in the room had passed into the translucent creature in his arms. He seemed to Nona like some one who has gone into a spring wood and come back carrying a long branch of silver blossom.

"Good heavens! Quelle plastique!" piped the Marchesa over Nona's shoulder.

The two had the floor to themselves: every one else had stopped dancing. But Lita and her partner seemed unaware of it. Her sole affair was to shower radiance, his to attune his lines to hers. Her face was a small still flower on a swaying stalk; all her expression was in her body, in that long legato movement like a weaving of grasses under a breeze, a looping of little waves on the shore.

"Look at Jim!" Heuston laughed. Jim Wyant, from a doorway, drank the vision thirstily. "Surely," his eyes seemed to triumph, "this justifies the Cubist Cabaret, and all the rest of her crazes."

Lita, swaying near him, dropped a smile, and floated off on the bright ripples of her beauty.

Abruptly the music stopped. Nona glanced across the room and saw Mrs. Manford move away from the musicians' balcony, over which the conductor had just leaned down to speak to her.

There was a short interval; then the orchestra broke into a fox– trot and the floor filled again. Mrs. Manford swept by with a set smile—"the kind she snaps on with her tiara," Nona thought. Well, perhaps it WAS rather bad form of Lita to monopolize the floor at her mother–in–law's ball; but was it the poor girl's fault if she danced so well that all the others stopped to gaze?

Ardwin came up to Nona. "Oh, no," Heuston protested under his breath. "I wanted—"

"There's Aggie signalling."

The girl's arm was already on Ardwin's shoulder. As they circled toward the middle of the room, Nona said: "You show off Lita's dancing marvellously."

He replied, in his high–pitched confident voice: "Oh, it's only a question of giving her her head and not butting in. She and I each have our own line of self–expression: it would be stupid to mix them. If only I could get her to dance just once for Serge Klawhammer; he's scouring the globe to find somebody to do the new 'Herodias' they're going to turn at Hollywood. People are fed up with the odalisque style, and with my help Lita could evolve something different. She's half promised to come round to my place tonight after supper and see Klawhammer. Just six or seven of the enlightened—wonder if you'd join us? He's tearing back to Hollywood tomorrow."

"Is Lita really coming?"

"Well, she said yes and no, and ended on yes."

"All right—I will." Nona hated Ardwin, his sleekness, suppleness, assurance, the group he ruled, the fashions he set, the doctrines he professed—hated them so passionately and undiscerningly that it seemed to her that at last she had her hand on her clue. That was it, of course! Ardwin and his crew were trying to persuade Lita to go into the movies; that accounted for her restlessness and irritability, her growing distaste for her humdrum life. Nona drew a breath of relief. After all, if it were only that—!

The dance over, she freed herself and slipped through the throng in quest of Jim. Should she ask him to take her to Ardwin's? No: simply tell him that she and Lita were off for a final spin at the decorator's studio, where there would be more room and less fuss than at Pauline's. Jim would laugh and approve, provided she and Lita went together; no use saying anything about Klawhammer and his absurd "Herodias."

"Jim? But, my dear, Jim went home long ago. I don't blame the poor boy," Mrs. Manford sighed, waylaid by her daughter, "because I know he has to be at the office so early; and it must be awfully boring, standing about all night and not dancing. But, darling, you must really help me to find your father. Supper's ready, and I can't imagine…"

The Marchesa's ferret face slipped between them as she trotted by on Mr.