She stole a glance at the tiny watch set in the circle of diamonds that banded her bare arm just below the elbow. Half past eleven. Dancing would begin at twelve. She had been smiling and twittering and looking sweet and demure or provocative and gay since eight o’clock, when the dinner for the debutantes had begun. How much longer could she keep it up? It was really absurd for them to suppose that she could go on like this until three or four o’clock in the morning, when her heart was broken— CHAPTER XVIII “Mr. David Nash!” Nothing, no one could have held her. The words had scarcely lift the butler’s lips when Sally reached David’s side, her full skirt, lengthened to the tips of her slippers by the frosty silver lace, billowing like sails at the mooring of the snug little bodice. She seized his gloved hands, her joy-widened eyes blazing over his face, his adored, so well-remembered face. “Oh, David! David! I thought you weren’t coming! I’d have died if you hadn’t come!” She stepped back a pace, her small hands swinging his as if she were a joyous child and there were no one else in the ballroom at all. “You look older, David! You haven’t been sick? You worked too hard to finish college? Oh, David—” His eyes laughed at her through a barrier of embarrassment, and his startlingly grim young face softened. It was true that he looked much older; boyishness had left him, and Sally could have screamed out her pain that this was so. He was thinner, or appeared to be, in his perfectly fitting evening clothes. Odd to see him dressed like that, she thought, near to tears. She had seen him in overalls and cheap “jeans” and in decent but inexpensive tweeds. She had seen his big-muscled arms bare, the summer sun gilding the fine hairs upon them; she had seen him sweating over the cook stove in the privilege car of Bybee’s Bigger and Better Carnival Shows, stripped to a thin cotton undershirt. But she had never before seen him like this—immaculate, correct, of a pattern, apparently, with all other well-dressed young college men. And she was illogically hurt, felt as if the correctly stiff bosom of his shirt was a veritable wall between the old David and the old Sally— “They’ve cut off your beautiful hair,” were his first words. She stood still, her hands slowly releasing his, feeling his eyes rove over her, as hers had swept over him, and she did not need to look into his eyes to find that he was withdrawing from her, alienated, bewildered, saddened. She wanted to cry out to him, to beat his breast with her hands: “It’s Sally, David! Sally Ford underneath, Sally who loves you better than anything in the world.” But she did not say it, for Enid Barr was at her elbow, and it was her mother’s coldest most polite voice that was welcoming David. “We’re so glad you could come, Mr. Nash. Did you have a pleasant journey? I’m glad. Sally, you _must_ come back into the receiving line, darling. I’ll introduce Mr. Nash.”