“You give me a new view, Mr. Mavick.  I confess that I did not expect to assist at what New Englanders call an ‘evening meeting.’  I thought Eros was the deity of the dance.”

“That, Mrs. Lamon, is a vulgar error.  It is an ancient form of worship.  Virtue and beauty are the same thing—­the two graces.”

“What a nice apothegm!  It makes religion so easy and agreeable.”

“As easy as gravitation.”

“Dear me, Mr. Mavick, I thought this was a question of levitation.  You are upsetting all my ideas.  I shall not have the comfort of repenting of this episode in Lent.”

“Oh yes; you can be sorry that the dancing was not more alluring.”

Meantime there was heard the popping of corks.  Venetian glasses filled with champagne were quaffed under the blessing of sparkling eyes, young girls, almond-eyed for the occasion, in the costume of Tokyo, handed round ices, and the hum of accelerated conversation filled the studio.

“And your wife didn’t come?”

“Wouldn’t,” replied Jack Delancy, with a little bow, before he raised his glass.  And then added, “Her taste isn’t for this sort of thing.”

The girl, already flushed with the wine, blushed a little—­Jack thought he had never seen her look so dazzlingly handsome—­as she said, “And you think mine is?”

“Bless me, no, I didn’t mean that; that is, you know”—­Jack didn’t exactly see his way out of the dilemma—­“Edith is a little old-fashioned; but what’s the harm in this, anyway?”

“I did not say there was any,” she replied, with a smile at his embarrassment.  “Only I think there are half a dozen women in the room who could do it better, with a little practice.  It isn’t as Oriental as I thought it would be.”

“I cannot say as to that.  I know Edith thinks I’ve gone into the depths of the Orient.  But, on the whole, I’m glad—­” Jack stopped on the verge of speaking out of his better nature.

“Now don’t be rude again.  I quite understand that she is not here.”

The dialogue was cut short by a clapping of hands.  The spectators took their places again, the lights were lowered, the illumination was turned on the white canvas, and the dancer, warmed with wine and adulation, took a bolder pose, and, as her limbs began to move, sang a wild Moorish melody in a shrill voice, action and words flowing together into the passion of the daughter of tents in a desert life.  It was all vigorous, suggestive, more properly religious, Mavick would have said, and the applause was vociferous.

More wine went about.  There was another dance, and then another, a slow languid movement, half melancholy and full of sorrow, if one might say that of a movement, for unrepented sin; a gypsy dance this, accompanied by the mournful song of Boabdil, “The Last Sigh of the Moor.”  And suddenly, when the feelings of the spectators were melted to tender regret, a flash out of all this into a joyous defiance, a wooing of pleasure with smiling lips and swift feet, with the clash of cymbals and the quickened throb of the drum.  And so an end with the dawn of a new day.