pot. When Happy
Mather and Crocker and Lazelle and the superior Mr. Hicks did arrive,
she would have her revenge. She would refuse flatly. She would dance
with Skippy openly and defiantly the whole evening. The only drawback
was that no one came.

They sat out two dances and then a feeling of panic descended upon them.
They were horribly, glaringly conspicuous. Every eye was on them. Every
one was whispering at their expense. Dolly had never known the sensation
of being a wallflower, and for the first time her natural wit deserted
her. At first she had deployed all the instinctive arts of her
challenged coquetry. She had openly flaunted her affection for Skippy,
smiling into his fascinated eyes, laughing uproariously at the
inanities he had to offer. Then her spirits suddenly evaporated and she
listened with a cold creepy feeling in her back, while Skippy, in
desperation for a topic of conversation, began to explain the
intricacies of Mosquito-Proof Socks, to perfecting which his life
henceforth would be devoted.

"Let's dance."

Skippy, halfway in his exposition of the commercial value of an
invention which would appeal to twice ninety million legs at six pair of
socks a year, flushed and rose heavily. The light had dawned upon him at
last. They were being put in coventry and the diabolical mind that was
thus taking its fiendish revenge could be none other than the man he had
wronged--Hickey Hicks.

From now on it was torture, pure, unadulterated, exquisite torture, such
as only the self-conscious stripling of the first sixteen awkward years
can experience. To save his life he could not think of a thing to say,
while in his arms Dolly grew heavier and heavier. His arm ached, his
feet began to stumble, he bumped into other couples.

After he had sat out the eighth dance in fitful silence, he began to
experience the strangest antipathy for Miss Dolly Travers, who but an
hour before had been the rapturous ending of all his day dreams. Let no
cynic here exclaim, with facile wit, that romance ends thus in the
compulsory quality of marriage. We make no such allusions. We only state
that Skippy, in his inexperience, began morally to disintegrate. The
more he was forced to sit, chained by convention, the object of public
hilarity, the more he wondered at his former infatuation. Dolly disputed
by every male was a figment of the imagination--how different was the
reality! Mimi Lafontaine was a hundred times more desirable