he thought of what she would say to-night at this revel, faintly
prestiged already by the sounds of high and low laughter and slippered
footsteps, and movements of couples up and down the stairs. She would
talk the language she had talked for many years--her line--made up of
the current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung
together into an intrinsic whole, careless, faintly provocative,
delicately sentimental. She stalled faintly as she heard a girl
sitting on the stairs near her say: "You don't know the half of it,
dearie!"

And as she smiled her anger melted for a moment, and closing her eyes
she drew in a deep breath of pleasure. She dropped her arms to her
side until they were faintly touching the sleek sheath that covered
and suggested her figure. She had never felt her own softness so much
nor so enjoyed the whiteness of her own arms.

"I smell sweet," she said to herself simply, and then came another
thought "I'm made for love."

She liked the sound of this and thought it again; then inevitable
succession came her new-born riot of dreams about Gordon. The twist of
her imagination which, two months before, had disclosed to her her
unguessed desire to see him again, seemed now to have been leading up
to this dance, this hour.

For all her sleek beauty, Edith was a grave, slow-thinking girl. There
was a streak in her of that same desire to ponder, of that adolescent
idealism that had turned her brother socialist and pacifist. Henry
Bradin had left Cornell, where he had been an instructor in economies,
and had come to New York to pour the latest cures for incurable evils
into the columns of a radical weekly newspaper.

Edith, less fatuously, would have been content to cure Gordon
Sterrett. There was a quality of weakness in Gordon that she wanted to
take care of; there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to
protect. And she wanted someone she had known a long while, someone
who had loved her a long while. She was a little tired; she wanted to
get married. Out of a pile of letters, half a dozen pictures and as
many memories, and this weariness, she had decided that next time she
saw Gordon their relations were going to be changed. She would say
something that would change them. There was this evening. This was her
evening. All evenings were her evenings.

Then her thoughts were interrupted by a solemn undergraduate with a
hurt look and an air of strained formality who presented himself