Sedately and gracefully they danced the
steps of their selection in the balmy tea hours, accomplishing with a
certain dignity the movements so horribly burlesqued by clerk and chorus
girl the country over. It seemed ironic that in this lone and
discredited offspring of the arts Americans should excel,
unquestionably.
Having danced and splashed through a lavish spring, Anthony and Gloria
found that they had spent too much money and for this must go into
retirement for a certain period. There was Anthony's "work," they said.
Almost before they knew it they were back in the gray house, more aware
now that other lovers had slept there, other names had been called over
the banisters, other couples had sat upon the porch steps watching the
gray-green fields and the black bulk of woods beyond.
It was the same Anthony, more restless, inclined to quicken only under
the stimulus of several high-balls, faintly, almost imperceptibly,
apathetic toward Gloria. But Gloria--she would be twenty-four in August
and was in an attractive but sincere panic about it. Six years to
thirty! Had she been less in love with Anthony her sense of the flight
of time would have expressed itself in a reawakened interest in other
men, in a deliberate intention of extracting a transient gleam of
romance from every potential lover who glanced at her with lowered brows
over a shining dinner table.
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