It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard Hotel, and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered in a voluminous sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship for the poor. Many men had sailed on a bitter voyage to arctic regions and endured every privation of cold and hunger and peril that this young woman might ride cozy in any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who clubbed the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier in the warm city shop, when he sold the finished garment, took in far more than the men who went out into the wilderness and brought back the pelts. That did not seem right; yet he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not create the market for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all for their voyage. A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the industry, was beyond Davidge's imagining. He comforted himself with the thought that those loud mouths that advertised solutions of these labor problems were fools or liars or both; and their mouths were the tools they worked with most. The important immediate thing to contemplate was the fascinating head of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk of a sea-lion. CHAPTER III Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not entirely neglected the new school of foot improvisation, so different from the old set steps. Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man had so much of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened to the pipes of Pan and could "shake a sugar-heel" with a practised skill. There was a startling authority in the firmness with which he gathered her in and swept her through the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping, now limping, now running. He gripped the savory body of Mamise close to him and found her to his whim, foreseeing it with a mysterious prescience. Holding her thus intimately in the brief wedlock of the dance, he began to love her in a way that he could think of only one word for--_terrible_. She seemed to grow afraid, too, of the spell that was befogging them, and sought rescue in a flippancy. There was also a flattering spice of jealousy in what she murmured: "You haven't spent all your afternoons and evenings building ships, young man!" "No?" "What cabarets have you graduated from?" He quoted her own words, "Don't you wish you knew?" "No." "One thing is certain. I've never found in any of 'em as light a feather as you." "Are you referring to my head or my feet?" "Your blessed feet!" His arm about her tightened to a suffocation, and he whirled her in a delirium of motion.