, "Well--you only got angry because I couldn't dance
the cotillion with you. I--I didn't feel terribly hurt with you for
getting angry about that!"

"Was there any other reason? Did my telling you I liked you have
anything to do with it?"

She looked up gently, and, as George met her eyes, something exquisitely
touching, yet queerly delightful, gave him a catch in the throat. She
looked instantly away, and, turning, ran out from the palm grove, where
they stood, to the dancing-floor.

"Come on!" she cried. "Let's dance!"

He followed her.

"See here--I--I--" he stammered. "You mean--Do you--"

"No, no!" she laughed. "Let's dance!"

He put his arm about her almost tremulously, and they began to waltz. It
was a happy dance for both of them.

Christmas day is the children's, but the holidays are youth's
dancing-time. The holidays belong to the early twenties and the 'teens,
home from school and college. These years possess the holidays for a
little while, then possess them only in smiling, wistful memories of
holly and twinkling lights and dance-music, and charming faces
all aglow. It is the liveliest time in life, the happiest of the
irresponsible times in life. Mothers echo its happiness--nothing is like
a mother who has a son home from college, except another mother with a
son home from college. Bloom does actually come upon these mothers; it
is a visible thing; and they run like girls, walk like athletes, laugh
like sycophants. Yet they give up their sons to the daughters of other
mothers, and find it proud rapture enough to be allowed to sit and
watch.

Thus Isabel watched George and Lucy dancing, as together they danced
away the holidays of that year into the past.

"They seem to get along better than they did at first, those two
children," Fanny Minafer said sitting beside her at the Sharons' dance,
a week after the Assembly. "They seemed to be always having little
quarrels of some sort, at first. At least George did: he seemed to be
continually pecking at that lovely, dainty, little Lucy, and being cross
with her over nothing."

"Pecking?" Isabel laughed. "What a word to use about Georgie! I think I
never knew a more angelically amiable disposition in my life!"

Miss Fanny echoed her sister-in-law's laugh, but it was a rueful echo,
and not sweet. "He's amiable to you!" she said. "That's all the side of
him you ever happen to see. And why wouldn't he be amiable to anybody
that simply fell down and wo