ld
of them, they would have proved simple in the extreme--that life comes
to those who live out their possibilities, and not to those who deny
them. And Anne had many possibilities, and was living them fast. She
felt almost physically the beat of pleasure in the atmosphere about her,
and from it she reacted to a still higher pitch. She had drunk three
glasses, and her head was not strong. Her feet moved easily, and she was
very certain of her movements. She had become just hazy enough in her
mental processes to have attained that happy indifference to what is
likely to happen in the immediate future, and that equally happy
disregard of consequences which the virtuous never experience.
Impressions reduced themselves to their lowest terms--movement and
noise. The room was full of rapidly revolving figures. The racket was
incessant, and women's laughter rose shrill above it, like wind above a
storm. Anne moved amid it all as the controller of its destinies, and
wherever she went seemed to her to be the one stable point in the
kaleidoscopic changes. Men danced with her, but they were meaningless
men. One begged her to dance with him, but Anne stopped to watch a youth
blowing brutishly from puffed cheeks, so the man cursed and left her
for another girl. Beyond the puffing youth lights were dancing, green
and red. Anne paused and looked at them gravely.

The people, the room, the sounds seemed to her to come and go in great
bursts. Between these bursts Anne knew nothing except that she was
happy; above all else she was happy. As incidents men kissed her and she
drank; but these things were not essentially different from the lights
and the bursts of consciousness. Anne began to take everything for
granted.

After a time Anne paused again to look gravely at strange lights. But
this time they seemed not to be red or green, but to be of orange, in
long, fiery flashes, like ribbons thrown suddenly out and as suddenly
withdrawn. The noise stopped, and was succeeded by a buzzing. For a
moment the girl's blurred vision saw clearly the room, all still, except
for a man huddled in one corner, and on the floor a slowly gathering
pool of red. Someone thrust her out of the door with others, and she
began to step aimlessly, uncertainly, along the broad street.

She felt dimly the difference between the hot air of the dance-hall and
the warm air out of doors. The great hills and the stars and the
silhouetted houses came and went in visio