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His sister and mother exchanged glances and both spoke at once.

“Not now, Clay, you know—” began Clara.

“Really, Clay,” interrupted his mother, “you don’t know exactly what the standards are, so you can’t quite criticize. It happens to be a fad to paint a little more.”

Clayton was now rather angry.

“Will all the women at Mrs. Severance’s dance tonight be striped like this?”

Clara’s eyes flashed.

“Yes!”

“Then I don’t believe I care to go.”

Clara, about to flare up, caught her mother’s eye and was silent.

“Clay, I want you to go,” said Lady Blachford hastily. “People want to see you before they forget what you look like. And for tonight let’s not talk about war or paint.”

In the end Clay went. A navy subaltern called for his sister at ten and he followed in lonesome state at half-past. After half an hour he had had all he wanted. Frankly, the dance seemed all wrong. He remembered Mrs. Severance’s ante-bellum affairs—staid, correct occasions they were, with only a mere scattering from the faster set, just those people who couldn’t possibly be left out. Now it all was blent, somehow, in one set. His sister had not exaggerated, practically every girl there was painted, over-painted; girls whom he remembered as curate-hunters, holders of long conversations with earnest young men on incense and the validity of orders, girls who had been terrifyingly masculine and had talked about dances as if they were the amusement of the feeble-minded—all were there, trotting through the most extreme steps from over the water. He danced stiffly with many who had delighted his youth, and he found that he wasn’t enjoying himself at all. He found that he had come to picture England as a land of sorrow and asceticism, and while there was little extravagance displayed tonight, he thought that the atmosphere had fallen to that of artificial gaiety rather than risen to a stern calmness. Even under the carved, gilt ceiling of the Severances there was strangely an impression of dance-hall rather than dance. People arrived and departed most informally and, oddly enough, there was a dearth of older people rather than of younger. But there was something in the very faces of the girls, something which was half enthusiasm and half recklessness, that depressed him more than any concrete thing.