The music started up again. Miners darted here and there toward the gaudily dressed women, and, seizing them about the waist, held them close to their sides, as a claim of proprietorship before the whole world. Perspiring masters of ceremonies, self-constituted and drunk, rushed back and forth, trying to put a semblance of the quadrilateral into the various sets. Everybody shuffled feet impatiently. The dance began with a swirl of noise and hilarious confusion. Bismarck Anne added to the hilarity. She was having a high old time; why shouldn't she? She had had three glasses of forty-rod, and was blessed by nature with a lively disposition and an insignificant bump of reverence. Moreover, she was healthy of body, red of blood, and reckless of consequences. Pleasure appealed to her; the stir of action, the delight of the flow of high spirits, thrilled through every fibre of her being. She had no beliefs, as far as she knew. If she could have told of them, they would have proved simple in the extreme--that life comes to those who live out their possibilities, and not to those who deny them. And Anne had many possibilities, and was living them fast. She felt almost physically the beat of pleasure in the atmosphere about her, and from it she reacted to a still higher pitch. She had drunk three glasses, and her head was not strong. Her feet moved easily, and she was very certain of her movements. She had become just hazy enough in her mental processes to have attained that happy indifference to what is likely to happen in the immediate future, and that equally happy disregard of consequences which the virtuous never experience. Impressions reduced themselves to their lowest terms--movement and noise. The room was full of rapidly revolving figures. The racket was incessant, and women's laughter rose shrill above it, like wind above a storm. Anne moved amid it all as the controller of its destinies, and wherever she went seemed to her to be the one stable point in the kaleidoscopic changes. Men danced with her, but they were meaningless men. One begged her to dance with him, but Anne stopped to watch a youth blowing brutishly from puffed cheeks, so the man cursed and left her for another girl. Beyond the puffing youth lights were dancing, green and red. Anne paused and looked at them gravely. The people, the room, the sounds seemed to her to come and go in great bursts. Between these bursts Anne knew nothing except that she was happy; above all else she was happy. As incidents men kissed her and she drank; but these things were not essentially different from the lights and the bursts of consciousness. Anne began to take everything for granted.