me. I am--you make me uncertain--you make me uncomfortable. I don't
know just what to say to you or just how it will be taken. You mustn't
be--that way--with _me_; you won't, will you?"

He was silent for a moment; then his face lighted up. "No," he said,
laughing; "I'll open another can of platitudes.... You're a dear to
forgive me."

* * * * *

Dancing had been general before the cotillion; debutantes continued to
arrive in shoals from other dinners, a gay, rosy, eager throng, filling
drawing-rooms, conservatory, and library with birdlike flutter and
chatter, overflowing into the breakfast-room, banked up on the stairs in
bright-eyed battalions.

The cotillion, led by Jack Dysart dancing alone, was one of those
carefully thought out intellectual affairs which shakes New York society
to its intellectual foundations.

In one figure Geraldine came whizzing into the room in a Palm Beach
tricycle-chair trimmed with orchids and propelled by Peter Tappan; and
from her seat amid the flowers she distributed favours--live white
cockatoos, clinging, flapping, screeching on gilded wands; fans spangled
with tiny electric jewels; parasols of pink silk set with incandescent
lights; crystal cages containing great, pale-green Luna moths alive and
fluttering; circus hoops of gilt filled with white tissue paper, through
which the men jumped.

There was also a Totem-pole figure--and other things, including supper
and champagne, and the semi-obscurity of conservatory and stairs; and
there was the usual laughter to cover heart-aches, and the inevitable
torn gowns and crushed flowers; and a number of young men talking too
loud and too much in the cloak-room, and Rosalie Dysart admitting to
Scott Seagrave in the conservatory that nobody really understood her;
and Delancy Grandcourt edging about the outer borders of the flowery,
perfumed vortex, following Geraldine and losing her a hundred times.

On one of these occasions she was captured by Duane Mallett and convoyed
to the supper-room, where later she became utterly transfigured into a
laughing, blushing, sparkling, delicious creature, small ears singing
with her first venturesome glass of champagne.

All the world seemed laughing with her; life itself was only an endless
bubble of laughter, swelling the gay, unending chorus; life was the hot
breeze from scented fans stirring a thousand roses; life was the silken
throng and its whirling and its fever