oth of them knew every one present. Charlie had picked out with his eye
a still youthful mama, who would not, he believed, refuse to dance, but
would jest and appear flattered and, when after some hesitation she
consented, lean in his arms only a little more heavily than her
daughter. Gerald had singled a slender, faded woman in garments of ivory
lace, who, seated near Mme. Vannuccini in the far corner of the room,
was devoting herself to conversation as if she really had not cared to
dance. Gerald was moved to go and give her the chance of refusing, if
she were in total earnest. He remembered Blanche Seymour as a passionate
dancer still when he began to go to grownup parties.

Now her hair was gray, her face had lines, but she did not look
accustomed to them; there was plaintiveness in her expression, as if she
had been a young girl, really, made up for an elderly part in
theatricals, and did not like her part. It was some sense of this which
was attracting Gerald to her across the room. Leslie had ordered him to
dance, so dance he must. But the glare of festivity all around him did
something to his inner self comparable to a light too bright making the
eyes ache. Leslie would have told him that he picked up his party by the
wrong end. The general gaiety instead of infecting him, reinforced his
feeling that everybody, beneath the surface, was perplexed, bleeding,
afraid of the future, and had good cause to be.

The dinner had been interesting,--he had not been much affected, he was
glad to find, by the presence of the De Brezes,--but he had risen from
it haunted by the conviction that the Fosses were not happy. Nobody, if
one examined into it, was happy; all this pretense was pathetic to the
point of dreariness. Gerald knew everybody's affairs to some extent,
after spending most of his life in the same community, and a little city
where gossip is an elegant occupation. This person had made bad
investments; that one was crippled by the necessity to pay a son's
debts; this couple did not live in harmony, the husband was said to be
infatuated with a dancer. The fact that so much of their own fault
entered into people's misfortunes, while rousing rage, forced him to
pity, because the limitation of their intelligence had so much to do
with people's faults. He was in fact oppressed by the sense of the
limits set to all the lives around him in this beautiful little
Florence, his home, his love, sometimes his despair: the narr