Free Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton Page A

and flood one's soul with
peace. The vision was vague and contradictory, but it all seemed
to meet and mingle in the woman's eyes…
    Pauline was signalling from her table–end. He rose and offered his
arm to the Marchesa.
    In the hall the strains of the famous Somaliland orchestra bumped
and tossed downstairs from the ball–room to meet them. The ladies,
headed by Mrs. Toy, flocked to the mirror–lined lift dissembled
behind forced lilacs and Japanese plums; but Amalasuntha, on
Manford's arm, set her blunt black slipper on the marble tread.
    "I'm used to Roman palaces!"

VII
    "At least you'll take a turn?" Heuston said; and Nona, yielding,
joined the dancers balancing with slow steps about the shining
floor.
    Dancing meant nothing; it was like breathing; what would one be
doing if one weren't dancing? She could not refuse without seeming
singular; it was simpler to acquiesce, and lose one's self among
the couples absorbed in the same complicated ritual.
    The floor was full, but not crowded: Pauline always saw to that.
It was easy to calculate in advance, for every one she asked always
accepted, and she and Maisie Bruss, in making out the list,
allotted the requisite space per couple as carefully as if they had
been counting cubic feet in a hospital. The ventilation was
perfect too; neither draughts nor stuffiness. One had almost the
sense of dancing out of doors, under some equable southern sky.
Nona, aware of what it cost to produce this illusion, marvelled
once more at her tireless mother.
    "Isn't she wonderful?"
    Mrs. Manford, fresh, erect, a faint line of diamonds in her hair,
stood in the doorway, her slim foot advanced toward the dancers.
    "Perennially! Ah—she's going to dance. With Cosby."
    "Yes. I wish she wouldn't."
    "Wouldn't with Cosby?"
    "Dear, no. In general."
    Nona and Heuston had seated themselves, and were watching from
their corner the weaving of hallucinatory patterns by interjoined
revolving feet.
    "I see. You think she dances with a Purpose?"
    The girl smiled. "Awfully well—like everything else she does.
But as if it were something between going to church and drilling a
scout brigade. 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