It was with the strangest feeling that she took it out.  It seemed to her that the Sheila that had worn that dress was dead.

CHAPTER IX

A SINGEING OF WINGS

All the vitality of Millings—­and whatever its deficiencies the town lacked nothing of the splendor and vigor of its youth—­throbbed and stamped and shook the walls of the Town Hall that night.  To understand that dance, it is necessary to remember that it took place on a February night with the thermometer at zero and with the ground five feet beneath the surface of the snow.  There were men and women and children, too, who had come on skis and in toboggans for twenty miles from distant ranches to do honor to the wedding-anniversary of Greely and his wife.

A room near the ballroom was reserved for babies, and here, early in the evening, lay small bundles in helpless, more or less protesting, rows, their needs attended to between waltzes and polkas by father or mother according to the leisure of the parent and the nature of the need.  One infant, whose home discipline was not up to the requirements of this event, refused to accommodate himself to loneliness and so spent the evening being dandled, first by father, then by mother, in a chair immediately beside the big drum.  Whether the spot was chosen for the purpose of smothering his cries or enlivening his spirits nobody cared to inquire.  Infants in the Millings and Hidden Creek communities, where certified milk and scientific feeding were unknown, were treated rather like family parasites to be attended to only when the irritation they caused became acute.  They were not taken very seriously.  That they grew up at all was largely due to their being turned out as soon as they could walk into an air that buoyed the entire nervous and circulatory systems almost above the need of any other stimulant.

The dance began when the first guests arrived, which on this occasion was at about six o’clock, and went on till the last guest left, at about ten the next morning.  In the meantime the Greelys’ hospitality provided every variety of refreshment.

When Sheila reached the Town Hall, crowded between Sylvester and joyous Babe in her turquoise blue on the front seat of the Ford, while the back seat was occupied by Girlie in scarlet and “Momma” in purple velveteen, the dance was well under way.  The Hudsons came in upon the tumult of a quadrille.  The directions, chanted above the din, were not very exactly heeded; there was as much confusion as there was mirth.  Sheila, standing near Girlie’s elbow, felt the exhilaration which youth does feel at the impact of explosive noise and motion, the stamping of feet, the shouting, the loud laughter, the music, the bounding, prancing bodies:  savagery in a good humor, childhood again, but without the painful intensity of childhood.  Sheila wondered just as any debutante in a city ballroom wonders, whether she would have partners, whether she would have “a good time.”  Color came into her face.  She forgot everything except the immediate prospect of flattery and rhythmic motion.