boy. I think you’re mistaken about him. Maybe you’ve got him confused with somebody else. He’s—I don’t know—kind of a fascinating rascal, if you know what I mean.” Her blandly adoring eyes were following her granddaughter’s leisurely progress across the big, ornate room. “Babe can certainly dance,” she said, contentedly. [106] For nineteen, the scene had inevitably its zest in the tang of novelty. Glen assured herself hotly that she despised it all as a virulent manifestation of social injustice, but she had a pathetic hope of cramming her mind so full of new sensations that it would give over its unhappy ruminations for the moment. She forced her attention upon the dreadful, bedizened, pitiful old creature across the table, on the harsh lights, the endless, heavy courses of the meal; the strange, savage music with its throb and thrill and its sly, insinuating cadences, its bursts of jungle joy; the diners; the dancers; Janice Jennings and young Edward Harrington Du Val who had demonstrated that he could buy his own hooch and gardenias, moving so slowly, almost stealthily across the floor, their eyes blankly fixed on space, their mouths unsmiling, their flat and thin young bodies pressed painstakingly close together, their whole air[107] one of calculated ecstasy. She tried to make a vehement reality of it all, and she succeeded fairly well while she was in the midst of it, but back in her bed at last the radiant mood of fifteen hours before came back to her; battered and bruised, demanding sanctuary. [107] There was no illumination for her through the long night; its impenetrable velvet blackness was no thicker than the bewildered misery in her mind. Why? Why? Luke, whom she had pedestaled and pinnacled for five years; whom she had almost worshiped! Luke, who deserved the best, and to whom she had given her shabby worst. The thing was a bitter mystery; one moment, as gravely, as exultantly as a child waiting for its first communion, she had waited for him to ask her to marry him, ready—oh, rapturously ready—to say yes, the yes which had been waiting for him ever since the day of her father’s death; and the next moment she had been shivering, almost shuddering, frightened, unhappy, repelled. She was so bitterly ashamed. She repeated over and over, flagellating her sore spirit, that she had failed her father and her friend and herself. It was not until the first rooster had flung his raucous challenge at the mocking bird, singing deliriously in a magnolia tree, that the solution came to her. It was so startling, so
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