r to-night, and she wondered if he danced well.

Down-stairs, in the club's great room, she was surrounded for a moment
by the girls she had met in the afternoon, then she heard Sally's voice
repeating a cycle of names, and found herself bowing to a sextet of
black and white, terribly stiff, vaguely familiar figures. The name
Blaine figured somewhere, but at first she could not place him. A
very confused, very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bumpings
followed, and every one found himself talking to the person he least
desired to. Isabelle manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman
at Harvard, with whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the
stairs. A humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things
Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable. First, she
repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a soupcon
of Southern accent; then she held it off at a distance and smiled at
it--her wonderful smile; then she delivered it in variations and
played a sort of mental catch with it, all this in the nominal form
of dialogue. Froggy was fascinated and quite unconscious that this was
being done, not for him, but for the green eyes that glistened under the
shining carefully watered hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had
discovered Amory. As an actress even in the fullest flush of her own
conscious magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the
front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist. First, he had auburn
hair, and from her feeling of disappointment she knew that she had
expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement slenderness.... For
the rest, a faint flush and a straight, romantic profile; the effect set
off by a close-fitting dress suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind
that women still delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to
get tired of.

During this inspection Amory was quietly watching.

"Don't _you_ think so?" she said suddenly, turning to him,
innocent-eyed.

There was a stir, and Sally led the way over to their table. Amory
struggled to Isabelle's side, and whispered:

"You're my dinner partner, you know. We're all coached for each other."

Isabelle gasped--this was rather right in line. But really she felt
as if a good speech had been taken from the star and given to a minor
character.... She mustn't lose the leadership a bit. The dinner-table
glittered with laughter at the confusion of getting places