e to whom this sort of thing was really a pastime;
he would do it as one for whom pastimes had lost their meaning and who
would be in some sense taking a farewell.

The music breathed out its last drowsy cadence, and the whirlpool
resolved itself into a series of shimmering, subsidiary eddies. There
was a decentralizing movement toward the rugs and cushions on the steps,
or to the seclusion of seats skilfully embowered amid groups of palms.
Dowagers sought the rose-colored settees against the walls. Gentlemen,
clasping their white-gloved hands at the base of their spinal columns,
bent in graceful conversational postures. A few pairs of attractive
young people continued to pace the floor. Claude remained where he was.
He remained where he was partly because he hadn't decided what else to
do, and partly because his quick eye had singled out the one girl in the
room who embodied something that was not embodied by every other girl.

When first he saw her she was standing beside the Girardon fountain in
conversation with a young man. The fact that the young man was his
friend Cheever brought her directly within Claude's circle and stirred
that spirit of emulation which five minutes earlier he thought he had
outlived. The girl was adjusting something in her corsage, her glance
flying upward from the action of her fingers toward Cheever's face, not
shyly or coquettishly, but with a perfectly straightforward nonchalance
which might have meant anything from indifference to defiance.

Claude knew the precise moment at which she noticed him by the fact that
she glanced toward him twice in rapid succession, after which Cheever
glanced toward him, too. He understood then that she had been
sufficiently struck by him to ask his name, and judged that Billy would
treat him to some such pardonable epithet as "awful ass," in order to
keep her attention on himself. In this apparently he didn't succeed, for
presently they began to saunter in Claude's direction. The latter stood
his ground.

In the knowledge that he could endure scrutiny, he stood his ground with
an ease that plainly roused the young lady's interest. With her hand on
the arm of her cavalier she sauntered forward, and, swerving slightly,
sauntered by. She sauntered by with a lingering look of curiosity that
seemed to throw him a challenge. Never in his life had Claude received
such a look. It was perhaps the characteristic look of the girl of the
twentieth century. It was