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After dinner the party swelled to forty and there was dancing in a large ex-playroom downstairs. Everything went smoothly—boys cut in on Isabelle every few feet and then squabbled in the corners with: “You might let me get more than an inch,” and “She didn’t like it either—she told me so next time I cut in.” It was true—she told everyone so, and gave every hand a parting pressure that said “You know that your dances are making my evening.”

But time passed, two hours of it, and the less subtle beaux had better learned to focus their pseudo-passionate glances elsewhere, for eleven o’clock found Isabelle and Kenneth on a leather lounge in a little den off the music room. She was conscious that they were a handsome pair and seemed to belong distinctively on this leather lounge while lesser lights fluttered and chattered downstairs. Boys who passed the door looked in enviously—girls who passed only laughed and frowned and grew wise within themselves.

They had now reached a very definite stage. They had traded ages, eighteen and sixteen. She had listened to much that she had heard before. He was a freshman at college, sang in the glee club and expected to make the freshman hockey-team. He had learned that some of the boys she went with in Pittsburg were “terrible speeds” and came to parties intoxicated—most of them were nineteen or so, and drove alluring Stutzes. A good half of them seemed to have already flunked out of various boarding schools and colleges, but some of them bore good collegiate names that made him feel rather young. As a matter of fact Isabelle’s acquaintance with college boys was mostly through older cousins. She had bowing acquaintance with a lot of young men who thought she was “a pretty kid” and “worth keeping an eye on.” But Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gaiety that would have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young contralto voices on leather sofas.