Even while they were removing their overshoes they were peeping at the new decorations.  Carol saw Dave Dyer secretively turn over the gold pillows to find a price-tag, and heard Mr. Julius Flickerbaugh, the attorney, gasp, “Well, I’ll be switched,” as he viewed the vermilion print hanging against the Japanese obi.  She was amused.  But her high spirits slackened as she beheld them form in dress parade, in a long, silent, uneasy circle clear round the living-room.  She felt that she had been magically whisked back to her first party, at Sam Clark’s.

“Have I got to lift them, like so many pigs of iron?  I don’t know that I can make them happy, but I’ll make them hectic.”

A silver flame in the darkling circle, she whirled around, drew them with her smile, and sang, “I want my party to be noisy and undignified!  This is the christening of my house, and I want you to help me have a bad influence on it, so that it will be a giddy house.  For me, won’t you all join in an old-fashioned square dance?  And Mr. Dyer will call.”

She had a record on the phonograph; Dave Dyer was capering in the center of the floor, loose-jointed, lean, small, rusty headed, pointed of nose, clapping his hands and shouting, “Swing y’ pardners—­alamun lef!”

Even the millionaire Dawsons and Ezra Stowbody and “Professor” George Edwin Mott danced, looking only slightly foolish; and by rushing about the room and being coy and coaxing to all persons over forty-five, Carol got them into a waltz and a Virginia Reel.  But when she left them to disenjoy themselves in their own way Harry Haydock put a one-step record on the phonograph, the younger people took the floor, and all the elders sneaked back to their chairs, with crystallized smiles which meant, “Don’t believe I’ll try this one myself, but I do enjoy watching the youngsters dance.”

Half of them were silent; half resumed the discussions of that afternoon in the store.  Ezra Stowbody hunted for something to say, hid a yawn, and offered to Lyman Cass, the owner of the flour-mill, “How d’ you folks like the new furnace, Lym?  Huh?  So.”

“Oh, let them alone.  Don’t pester them.  They must like it, or they wouldn’t do it.”  Carol warned herself.  But they gazed at her so expectantly when she flickered past that she was reconvinced that in their debauches of respectability they had lost the power of play as well as the power of impersonal thought.  Even the dancers were gradually crushed by the invisible force of fifty perfectly pure and well-behaved and negative minds; and they sat down, two by two.  In twenty minutes the party was again elevated to the decorum of a prayer-meeting.

“We’re going to do something exciting,” Carol exclaimed to her new confidante, Vida Sherwin.  She saw that in the growing quiet her voice had carried across the room.  Nat Hicks, Ella Stowbody, and Dave Dyer were abstracted, fingers and lips slightly moving.  She knew with a cold certainty that Dave was rehearsing his “stunt” about the Norwegian catching the hen, Ella running over the first lines of “An Old Sweetheart of Mine,” and Nat thinking of his popular parody on Mark Antony’s oration.