it he ridiculed himself. Often when Tommy was feeling that now at last
the ladies must come to heel, he saw his face suddenly in a mirror,
and all the spirit went out of him. But still he clung to his velvet
jacket.

I see him in it, stalking through the terrible dances, a heroic figure
at last. He shuddered every time he found himself on one leg; he got
sternly into everybody's way; he was the butt of the little noodle of
an instructor. All the social tortures he endured grimly, in the hope
that at last the cork would come out. Then, though there were all
kinds of girls in the class, merry, sentimental, practical,
coquettish, prudes, there was no kind, he felt, whose heart he could
not touch. In love-making, as in the favourite Thrums game of the
dambrod, there are sixty-one openings, and he knew them all. Yet at
the last dance, as at the first, the universal opinion of his partners
(shop-girls, mostly, from the large millinery establishments, who had
to fly like Cinderellas when the clock struck a certain hour) was that
he kept himself to himself, and they were too much the lady to make up
to a gentleman who so obviously did not want them.

Pym encouraged his friends to jeer at Tommy's want of interest in the
sex, thinking it a way of goading him to action. One evening, the
bottles circulating, they mentioned one Dolly, goddess at some bar, as
a fit instructress for him. Coarse pleasantries passed, but for a time
he writhed in silence, then burst upon them indignantly for their
unmanly smirching of a woman's character, and swept out, leaving them
a little ashamed. That was very like Tommy.

But presently a desire came over him to see this girl, and it came
because they had hinted such dark things about her. That was like him
also.

There was probably no harm in Dolly, though it is man's proud right to
question it in exchange for his bitters. She was tall and willowy, and
stretched her neck like a swan, and returned you your change with
disdainful languor; to call such a haughty beauty Dolly was one of the
minor triumphs for man, and Dolly they all called her, except the only
one who could have given an artistic justification for it.

This one was a bearded stranger who, when he knew that Pym and his
friends were elsewhere, would enter the bar with a cigar in his mouth,
and ask for a whisky-and-water, which was heroism again, for smoking
was ever detestable to him, and whisky more offensive than quinine.
But the