tter stay indoors just now," she said persuasively.
"We can talk here just as well."

"We can't!" he insisted feverishly. "We can't, Julia! I've got something
to say, Julia. Julia, you gave me the first dance and the last dance,
and of course sitting together at supper, or whatever there is, and you
know as well as I do that means it's just the same as if you weren't
giving this party but it was somewhere else and I took you to it, and
it's always understood you _never_ dance more with anybody else than the
one you went with, when you go with that person to a place, because
that's the rights of it; and other towns it's just the same way; they do
that way there, just the same as here; they do that way everywhere,
because nobody else has got a right to cut in and dance more with you
than the one you go with, when you goes to a place with that one. Julia,
don't you see that's the regular way it is, and the only fair way it
ought to be?"

"What?"

"Weren't you even _listening_?" he cried.

"Yes, indeed, but----"

"Julia," he said desperately, "let's go out on the porch. I want to
explain just the way I feel. Let's go out on the porch, Julia. If we
stay here, somebody's just bound to interrupt us any minute before I can
explain the way I----"

But the prophecy was fulfilled even before it was concluded. A group of
loudly chattering girls and their escorts of the moment bore down upon
Julia, and shattered the tete-a-tete. Dislodged from Julia's side by a
large and eager girl, whom he had hated ever since she was six years old
and he five, Noble found himself staggering in a kind of suburb; for the
large girl's disregard of him, as she shouldered in, was actually
physical, and too powerful for him to resist. She wished to put her
coarse arm round Julia's waist, it appeared, and the whole group burbled
and clamoured: the party was _perfictly_ glorious; so was the waxed
floor; so was Julia, my _dear_, so was the music, the weather, and the
din they made!

Noble felt that his rights were being outraged. Until the next dance
began, every moment of her time was legally his--yet all he could even
see of her was the top of her head. And the minutes were flying.

He stood on tiptoe, thrust his head forward over the large girl's odious
shoulder, and shouted: "Julia! Let's go out on the porch!"

No one seemed to hear him.

"Julia----"

_Boom!_ Rackety-_Boom_! The drummer walloped his drums; a saxophone
squawked, and fiddl