ther, ducked and passed
beneath each other's arms, all to the stately strumming of the guitars.
They kept on doing these things. Johnny and Talbot soon got hold of the
sequence of events, and did them too.

At first Johnny was gloomy and distrait. Then, after he had, in the
changes of the dance, passed Mercedes a few times, he began to wake up.
I could make out in the firelight only the shapes of their figures and
the whiteness of their faces; but I could see that she lingered a moment
in Johnny's formal embrace, that she flirted against him in passing, and
I could guess that her eyes were on duty. When they returned to the
veranda, Johnny was chipper, the visitor darkly frowning, Mercedes
animated, and the other girl still faintly and aloofly smiling.

The fandango went on for an hour; and the rivalry between Johnny and the
young Spaniard grew in intensity. Certainly Mercedes did nothing to
modify it. The scene became more animated and more interesting. A slow,
gliding waltz was danced, and several posturing, stamping dances in
which the partners advanced and receded toward and from each other,
bending and swaying and holding aloft their arms. It was very pretty and
graceful and captivating; and to my unsophisticated mind a trifle
suggestive; though that thought was probably the result of my training
and the novelty of the sight. It must be remembered that many people see
harm in our round dances simply because they have not become
sufficiently accustomed to them to realize that the position of the
performers is meaninglessly conventional. Similarity the various rather
daring postures of some of these Spanish dances probably have become so
conventionalized by numberless repetitions along the formal requirements
of the dance that their possible significance has been long since
forgotten. The apparently deliberate luring of the man by the woman
exists solely in the mind of some such alien spectator as myself. I was
philosophical enough to say these things to myself; but Johnny was not.
He saw Mercedes languishing into the eyes of his rival; half fleeing
provocatively, her glances sparkling; bending and swaying her body in
allurement; finally in the finale of the dance, melting into her
partner's arms as though in surrender. He could not realize that these
were formal and established measures for a dance. He was too blind to
see that the partners separated quite calmly and sauntered nonchalantly
toward the veranda, the m