Blair labored up the stairway with Lane’s help.  At last they reached the floor from which had blared the strains of jazz.  Wide doors were open, through which Lane caught the flash of many colors.  Blair produced his tickets at the door.  There did not appear to be any one to take them.

Lane experienced an indefinable thrill at the scene.  The air seemed to reek with a mixed perfume and cigarette smoke—­to resound with high-keyed youthful laughter, wild and sweet and vacant above the strange, discordant music.  Then the flashing, changing, whirling colors of the dancers struck Lane as oriental, erotic, bizarre—­gorgeous golds and greens and reds striped by the conventional black.  Suddenly the blare ceased, and the shrill, trilling laughter had dominance.  The rapid circling of forms came to a sudden stop, and the dancers streamed in all directions over the floor.

“Dare, they’ve called time,” said Blair.  “Let’s get inside the ropes so we can see better.”

The hall was not large, but it was long, and shaped like a letter L with pillars running down the center.  Countless threads of many-colored strings of paper had been stretched from pillars to walls, hanging down almost within reach of the dancers.  Flags and gay bunting helped in the riotous effect of decoration.  The black-faced orchestra held forth on a raised platform at the point where the hall looked two ways.  Recesses, alcoves and open doors to other rooms, which the young couples were piling over each other to reach, gave Lane some inkling of what Blair had hinted.

“Now we’re out in the limelight,” announced Blair, as he halted.  “Let’s stand here and run the gauntlet until the next dance—­then we can find seats.”

Almost at once a stream of gay couples enveloped them in passing.  Bright, flashing, vivid faces and bare shoulders, arms and breasts appeared above the short bodices of the girls.  Few of them were gowned in white.  The colors seemed too garish for anything but musical comedy.  But the freshness, the vividness of these girls seemed exhilarating.  The murmur, the merriment touched a forgotten chord in Lane’s heart.  For a moment it seemed sweet to be there, once more in a gathering where pleasure was the pursuit.  It breathed of what seemed long ago, in a past that was infinitely more precious to remember because he had no future of hope or of ambition or dream.  Something had happened to him that now made the sensations of the moment stingingly bitter-sweet.  The freshness and fragrance, the color and excitement, the beauty and gayety were not for him.  Youth was dead.  He could never enter the lists with these young men, many no younger than he, for the favor and smile of a girl.  Resignation had not been so difficult in the spiritual moment of realization and resolve, but to be presented with one concrete and stunning actuality after another, each with its mocking might-have-been, had grown to be a terrible ordeal.