Broken-collared men and faded women struggled for elbow room like a
mass of flies caught on sticky paper. There was something both
heathenish and pathetic in the whole thing. The place was reekingly hot.

"Come on," said Joan, her blood stirred by the movement and sound.

Palgrave held her close and edged his way into the crowd between
pointed bare elbows and tightly clasped hands.

"They call this dancing!" he said.

"What do you call it?"

"A bullfight in Hades." And he laughed and put his cheek against her
hair and held her young slim body against his own. What did he care
what it was or where they were? He had all the excuse that he needed to
get the sense and scent of her. His utter distaste of being bruised and
bumped, and of adding himself to a heterogeneous collection of people
with no more individuality than sheep, who followed each other from
place to place in flocks after the manner of sheep, left him. This girl
was something more than a young, naive creature from the country,
childishly keen to do everything and go everywhere at fever
heat--something more than the very epitome of triumphant youth as clean
and sweet as apple blossoms, with whom to flirt and pose as being the
blase man of the world, the Mr. Know-All of civilization, a wild flower
in a hot house. Attracted at once by her exquisite coloring and
delicious profile, and amused by her imperative manner and intolerant
point of view, he had now begun to be piqued and intrigued by her
insurgent way of treating marriage and of ignoring her husband--by her
assumption of sexlessness and the fact that she was unmoved by his
compliments and looked at him with eyes in which there was no remote
suggestion of physical interest.

And it was this attitude, new to him hitherto on his easy way, that
began to challenge him, to stir in him a desire to bring her down to
his own level, to make her fall in love and become what he called
human. He had given her several evenings, and had put himself out to
cater to her eager demand to see life and burn the night away in crowds
and noise. He had treated her, this young, new thing, as he was in the
habit of treating any beautiful woman with whom he was on the verge of
an affair and who realized the art of give and take. But more than ever
she conveyed the impression of sex detachment to which he was wholly
unaccustomed. He might have been any inarticulate lad of her own age,
useful as a companion, to be ordered to