s engaged in. She had learned to do it perfectly.

She had learned it during the last two years; she was twenty when for
the first time she had the shock of finding herself without an applicant
for one of her dances. When she was sixteen "all the nice boys in town,"
as her mother said, crowded the Adamses' small veranda and steps, or sat
near by, cross-legged on the lawn, on summer evenings; and at eighteen
she had replaced the boys with "the older men." By this time most of
"the other girls," her contemporaries, were away at school or college,
and when they came home to stay, they "came out"--that feeble revival
of an ancient custom offering the maiden to the ceremonial inspection of
the tribe. Alice neither went away nor "came out," and, in contrast with
those who did, she may have seemed to lack freshness of lustre--jewels
are richest when revealed all new in a white velvet box. And Alice may
have been too eager to secure new retainers, too kind in her efforts to
keep the old ones. She had been a belle too soon.

CHAPTER VIII

The device of the absentee partner has the defect that it cannot be
employed for longer than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and it may
not be repeated more than twice in one evening: a single repetition,
indeed, is weak, and may prove a betrayal. Alice knew that her present
performance could be effective during only this interval between
dances; and though her eyes were guarded, she anxiously counted over the
partnerless young men who lounged together in the doorways within her
view. Every one of them ought to have asked her for dances, she thought,
and although she might have been put to it to give a reason why any of
them "ought," her heart was hot with resentment against them.

For a girl who has been a belle, it is harder to live through these bad
times than it is for one who has never known anything better. Like a
figure of painted and brightly varnished wood, Ella Dowling sat against
the wall through dance after dance with glassy imperturbability; it was
easier to be wooden, Alice thought, if you had your mother with you, as
Ella had. You were left with at least the shred of a pretense that you
came to sit with your mother as a spectator, and not to offer yourself
to be danced with by men who looked you over and rejected you--not for
the first time. "Not for the first time": there lay a sting! Why had you
thought this time might be different from the other times? Why had you
bro