It avoided that awkward movement of raising
the near arm.
His second _faux pas_ was unconscious. She had spent the
afternoon at the hairdresser's; the idea of any calamity overtaking
her hair was extremely repugnant--yet as Peter made his unfortunate
attempt the point of his elbow had just faintly brushed it. That was
his second _faux pas_. Two were quite enough.
He had begun to murmur. At the first murmur she had decided that he
was nothing but a college boy--Edith was twenty-two, and anyhow, this
dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding her, with the
accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something else--of another
dance and another man, a man for whom her feelings had been little
more than a sad-eyed, adolescent mooniness. Edith Bradin was falling
in love with her recollection of Gordon Sterrett.
So she came out of the dressing-room at Delmonico's and stood for a
second in the doorway looking over the shoulders of a black dress in
front of her at the groups of Yale men who flitted like dignified
black moths around the head of the stairs. From the room she had left
drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and fro of many
scented young beauties--rich perfumes and the fragile memory-laden
dust of fragrant powders. This odor drifting out acquired the tang of
cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensuously down the
stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma Psi dance was to be
held.
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