more than a sad-eyed, adolescent mooniness. Edith Bradin was falling
in love with her recollection of Gordon Sterrett.

So she came out of the dressing-room at Delmonico's and stood for a
second in the doorway looking over the shoulders of a black dress in
front of her at the groups of Yale men who flitted like dignified
black moths around the head of the stairs. From the room she had left
drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and fro of many
scented young beauties--rich perfumes and the fragile memory-laden
dust of fragrant powders. This odor drifting out acquired the tang of
cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensuously down the
stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma Psi dance was to be
held. It was an odor she knew well, exciting, stimulating, restlessly
sweet--the odor of a fashionable dance.

She thought of her own appearance. Her bare arms and shoulders were
powdered to a creamy white. She knew they looked very soft and would
gleam like milk against the black backs that were to silhouette them
to-night. The hairdressing had been a success; her reddish mass of
hair was piled and crushed and creased to an arrogant marvel of mobile
curves. Her lips were finely made of deep carmine; the irises of her
eyes were delicate, breakable blue, like china eyes. She was a
complete, infinitely delicate, quite perfect thing of beauty, flowing
in an even line from a complex coiffure to two small slim feet.

She thought of what she would say to-night at this revel, faintly
prestiged already by the sounds of high and low laughter and slippered
footsteps, and movements of couples up and down the stairs. She would
talk the language she had talked for many years--her line--made up of
the current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung