t of the dancers at
the housewarming.

I remember sitting up with Hallie through the earlier part of that
evening, and with a sort of worship, looking for the first time at
women with uncovered necks and arms emerging white as wax from their
diaphanous or glittering gowns. To me they were radiant, transported
to a sphere of existence beyond my own, something I never would attain
to. I recall them as a vague, dreamlike spectacle. In all of it there
is but one incident that I remember clearly; and that is, when whirling
out of the crowd and into an empty space, that the dancers had left
clear for a moment, came a couple--a large blond girl and a young man,
a boy, hardly as old as she, but so handsome, so dark, so full of life,
and a sparkling sort of mischief, that it made one feel quite gay just
to look at him. As they danced past the place where Hallie and I were
sitting he was holding his partner's gauzy train in his long, fine
fingers, and they went by us laughing.

"Who is that?" I whispered.

"That's Johnny Montgomery," Hallie whispered back.

"Who's he?"

"Why don't you know?" Hallie cried. She dearly loved to give
information. "The Montgomerys were one of the very best families here;
and he's the last of them. Old lady Montgomery died the year we went
away to school, and he had heaps of money--but he lost it."

My sole performance in this line had been the dropping of a two-bit
piece down a crack in the board walk, and before I had time to ask how
Johnny Montgomery had managed to lose sight of "heaps," Mr. Ferguson
came up and asked, "Don't you little girls want some ice-cream?" so I
forgot to say any more about it.

That same season there was another notable occasion, when Hallie led me
to the bedroom of her grown-up sister, and exhibited to me with
awe-struck pride the dress her sister was to wear to the Sumner Light
Guards' ball that night. It was a blue tulle with a fine frost of
spangles over the bodice, and it seemed too dazzling to belong to a
creature less wonderful than a fairy. But when Hallie went on, in a
cautious whisper lest we be discovered, to confide to me that when she
was grown up and out of school her mother had promised to give her a
party, and that, since I was her best friend, of course she was going
to invite me first of all, I began to realize that I, too, might some
day grow up into a young lady, and be laced into a gown perhaps as
beautiful as the one spread out on the