He turned from her to Henrietta Vance as though nothing unusual had happened, resolving to see her later in the evening and in the meanwhile invent some suitable excuse.  Henrietta Vance did not even see his hand; she was a very jolly girl, ordinarily, and laughed all the time.  Now she looked him squarely in the face without so much as a smile, at once angry and surprised; never had anything seemed so hateful and disagreeable.  Vandover put his hand back into his pocket, trying to carry it all off with a laugh, saying in order to make her laugh with him as he used to do, “Hello! how do you do this evening?  It’s a pleasant morning this afternoon.”  “How do you do?” she answered nervously, refusing to laugh.  Then she turned from him abruptly to talk to young Haight’s little cousin Hetty.

Mrs. Vance was neither embarrassed nor nervous as the girls had been.  She stared calmly at Vandover and said with a peculiar smile, “I am surprised to see you here, Mr. Vandover.”

An hour later the dance was in full swing.  Almost every number was a waltz or a two-step, the music being the topical songs and popular airs of the day set to dance music.

About half-past ten o’clock, between two dances, the cornet sounded a trumpet call; the conversation ceased in a moment, and Henrietta Vance’s brother, standing by the piano, called out, “The next dance will be the first extra,” adding immediately, “a waltz.”  The dance recommenced; in the pauses of the music one heard the rhythmic movement of the feet shuffling regularly in one-two-three time.

Some of the couples waltzed fast, whirling about the rooms, bearing around corners with a swirl and swing of silk skirts, the girls’ faces flushed and perspiring, their eyes half-closed, their bare, white throats warm, moist, and alternately swelling and contracting with their quick breathing.  On certain of these girls the dancing produced a peculiar effect.  The continued motion, the whirl of the lights, the heat of the room, the heavy perfume of the flowers, the cadence of the music, even the physical fatigue, reacted in some strange way upon their oversensitive feminine nerves, the monotony of repeated sensation producing some sort of mildly hypnotic effect, a morbid hysterical pleasure the more exquisite because mixed with pain.  These were the girls whom one heard declaring that they could dance all night, the girls who could dance until they dropped.

Other of the couples danced with the greatest languor and gravity, their arms held out rigid and at right angles with their bodies.

About the doors and hallways stood the unhappy gentlemen who knew no one, watching the others dance, feigning to be amused.  Some of them, however, had ascended to the dressing-room and began to strike up an acquaintance with each other and with Ellis, smoking incessantly, discussing business, politics, and even religion.