Dancers in the Dark. Dorothy Speare
expect?” mumbled Jerry, her mouth full of thread. “They live so far away, up here in the woods, not near any city or burg large enough to call a town—naturally they want to play around a little, when they import some girls here!”
“Perhaps you think,” said Sarah suddenly, “that that freshman down there isn’t going to drop a few leading remarks when our little comrades come—unless we’re there first!” She turned to Joy. “You’re ready—won’t you go down and talk to them—tell ’em we’re coming right along?”
“I’d be glad to!” and Joy made a swift exit. She was already conscious that she liked Jerry and did not like Sarah. This, she told herself, was not because Jerry had liked her voice—there was something about Jerry. But it would be awful for her to take her voice seriously. She wouldn’t be a real girl any longer—a girl like these Prom specimens, a few of whom were floating around the halls now, pale and sleepy, with Magic Curlers in their hair—hard to recognise as the overpowering beings of last night.
She passed on down to the first floor, where things were a little more animated. A talking machine was playing and several men were sitting around in more or less expectant attitudes. Tom was not there, nor were the two “little comrades” of her roommates. Embarrassed, she was about to retreat, when one of the men detached himself from a group at the end of the room and came over to her. It was Jack Barnett.
“I was hoping I would get a chance to see you this morning.”
She was speechless with delight. If he could have known that he had been her last waking thought! It is as well that man cannot follow the intensely-flickering dreams and fancies of maidenhood. The two stood and looked at each other in a charmed silence.
“Well?” he challenged.
“You took the words out of my mouth when I saw you; what more can I say?” she retorted with a laugh.
She was very lovely. His eyes dwelt upon her with minute appreciation, as they automatically moved off to a corner. She only dared to look at him from beneath the protective fringe of lowered lashes, lest his eyes catch hers and hold them until she would have to tear them away by force. She laughed aloud.
“What are you laughing at, you funny girl?” he demanded.
“Oh, nothing. I was only wondering if—if it was wrong to hold eyes.”
“Not half as wrong as some other things,” he smiled.
There they were. Two sentences, and they were skimming on the thin ice of conversation towards topics youth loves to discuss “broad-mindedly and impersonally.” Joy hesitated, and drew back.
“Are you sleepy from last night? You don’t look a bit tired.”
“Oh, I’m not. It’ll take several steady nights of this to put me under.” He stretched his impressive length, which she regarded with respect.
“You’re one of these men—who the clinging vines say are ‘so big and strong and yet so kind and gentle’—aren’t you?”
“Kind—and—gentle?” he laughed. “No one ever told me that.”
This time he compelled her to look at him, and under his smiling eyes she suddenly shivered. An irrelevant thought had drifted in—that, when people were as wonderful as he, they always seemed to get everything they wanted, and—they always were wanting something else. But the thought wandered out again at his next words.
“You are the prettiest girl I have ever seen. No—don’t speak! What do you know about it? Last night I suspected—this morning, I know. Morning’s the acid test, you see.”
There was a clatter on the stairs and Jerry bounced into the room. She was chewing gum again. After her came Sarah, evenly pink and white, superbly arrayed, and walking with the carriage of an empress.
Jerry walked into the group of men, chewing in long, steady rolls. “Gum, gum, nothing but gum,” she chanted, then looked at them piteously. “Nothing for breakfast but gum! Can’t anyone bring coffee and rolls to the gum-chewer? Anyone?”
“Not unless you let me hold your gum while you have breakfast,” one romantic youth threw at her.
Joy watched with breathless interest.
“I have never seen such a girl!”
“She’s a marvel,” conceded Barnett. “Gets younger all the time—and I gather she isn’t as young as she looks.”
The appearance of Tom in the doorway cut short further revelations.
“I have a feeling that I’m going to trail you to-day,” Barnett said, rising. “And as for to-night at Prom—words are futile!”
His eyes caressed her. It was no moment for Tom to join them. She felt as if something within her were singing. And Tom came over to her—Tom, with his chubby red face and eyes that could never look tenderly at anything!
“Well, Joy, what’s doing along the Rialto?”
“N-nothing much, so early in the day; what does one expect at this hour?” she managed to bring out, hoping that Tom did not notice anything unusual in her manner.
“You’ve made a dent on Jack Barnett—I can see those.” He gave her a look of appraisal. “Hang it, Joy, I knew you’d put a crimp in all the gold diggers and hundredth anniversaries around.”
“Speaking of hundredth anniversaries, my roommates—they’re—well, I’ve never seen anything like them before.”
He looked over to where Sarah was sitting with her hand on the coat-sleeve of a dazzled youth, gazing up at him with her shadowed, speaking eyes. Then his eyes wandered to where Jerry was singing a song for her breakfast—
“Come to my home in the sewer
Said the cock-roach to his mate—
Where the air is so foul and impew-er
And the swimming’s simply great!”
“That’s because this is your first Prom,” he said.
The day passed in swift confusion of events and men, and chattering girls, and efforts to chatter at least as much and as entertainingly as the others did, if not more. In the afternoon they danced at the different fraternity houses; and wherever they went, Jack Barnett followed, to cut in on Joy, and to thrill her with his tenderly smiling eyes. It was a mammoth achievement to be rushed by the big man of college; and Tom was gloatingly impressed.
“You’ve got Jack Barnett going! I guess my taste isn’t so bad—eh, what, Joy?”
“Oh—he probably rushes a new girl every day,” she responded, over the leaps and bounds of her heart, which was making itself known to her in a strange, deliciously-disturbing way.
“Not a chance!” Tom disqualified her statement; “he’s some picker, Barnett is—it’s not very often he gives a girl any time at all—and when he does, she has to be a wonder!”
When the girls finally went upstairs to dress for Prom, Joy found that even her roommates were impressed.
“You certainly have got Jack Barnett going,” drawled Sarah. The words were almost the same as Tom’s, but her voice brought an entirely different connotation.
Jerry pirouetted around Joy. “I like to see the blasé old Barnett, who thinks he knows it all, on the trail of a new one!”
She came to a pause as Joy pulled out her Prom dress and laid it on the bed. It was a fairy-like mass of fluffy-white tulle, which Joy had saved for the big night. Jerry pounced on it and held it up.
“Will you let me add some touches to you to-night?” she demanded. “I want to see Jack’s jaw drop and watch him stagger back as you come breezing down the stairs! I want to see you overwhelm him!”
“I—I would just love to overwhelm him,” said Joy,