“Oh, they all look good when they’re far away,” she said, picking that bit of comic supplement slang deliberately to annoy him.  “I don’t believe our grandfathers and grandmothers were always such models of decorum as they tried, when they had grown old, to make us think.  And the simple primitive joys ...  I believe an old-fashioned husking bee, if they had plenty of hard cider to go with it, was just as bad as this—­coarser if not so vulgar.  After all, most of these people will go virtuously home to bed pretty soon and you’d find them back at work to-morrow morning not any the worse, really, for this.  It may be a rather poor sort of home they go to, but how do you know that the vine-covered cottage you have been talking about was any better?”

“Not to mention,” he added, in humorous concurrence, “that there was probably typhoid in the well the old oaken bucket hung in.  It seems odd to be convicted of sentimentality by an innocent babe like you.  But if you had been looking at the party down at the end table behind you that I’ve had under my eye for ten minutes, perhaps you’d feel more as I do.  No! don’t turn around; they have been looking at us.”

“Moralizing over us, perhaps,” she suggested.  “Thinking how wicked we probably were.”

“No,” he said, “I happen to know the girls.  They live down in our part of town, just over in the Village, that is.  They have been here six or eight years.  One of them was quite a promising young illustrator once.  And they’re both well-bred—­came obviously from good homes.  And they’ve both gone, well—­clean over the edge.”

Somehow his innocent euphemism annoyed her.  “You mean they are prostitutes?” she asked.

He frowned in protest at her employment of the word but assented unequivocally.  He was used—­as who is not—­to hearing young women discuss outspokenly such topics but he couldn’t forgive it from one who looked like Mary Wollaston.

“I have a hunch,” he said, “that the two boys who are with them are officers out of uniform.  I noticed that they looked the other way pretty carefully when that major who is sitting at the next table to ours came in.”

“Let’s dance again,” she said.  “I love this Hawaiian Moonlight thing.”

He saw her take the opportunity that rising from the table gave her for a good square look at the party he had been talking about and some change in her manner made him say with quick concern, “What is it?”

But she ignored the question and stepped out upon the floor with him.  They had danced half-way round the room when she said quietly, “One of the boys at that table is my brother Rush.”

Baldwin said, “He has seen you, I think.”  He felt her give a sort of gasp before she replied but the words came steadily enough.

“Oh, yes, we saw each other at the same time.”

He said nothing more, just went on dancing around the room with her in silence, taking care, without appearing to do so, to cut the corner where Rush was sitting, rather broadly.  After two or three rounds of the floor, she flagged a little and without asking any questions, he led her back to their table.  Luckily, Christabel and her Iowan had disappeared.