Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest night-clubs, at once left me to dance with the first acquaintance he saw. This was Mrs. Ammon. Whereas I, in not dancing, was following an example set by many present. We, we watched our elders dance with each other’s mothers, and for them the band on the balcony played with a sensibility approaching grief. There was no tune. But it is absurd, this querulous demand of young people for “tunes”! Our fathers and our mothers have done with “tunes.” Let there, our uncles say, be a rhythm. Let there, say our aunts, be syncopation. There was a rhythm. There was syncopation. Grave, profound, unforgettable, there was a rhythm. It had a beat like the throbbing of an agonised heart lost in an artery of the Underground. Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you of past and passing things. It reminded you of the days when, people over forty had still enough restraint not to crowd out every ballroom and night-club with their dancing in open formation, playfully aiming at each other’s tonsils with their feet. It reminded you of the scent tangled in the hair of she with whom you had last danced to that rhythm. You saw the soft line of her face by your shoulder, the tender pocket behind her ear, the absorbed excursion of her breath through her nostrils, the dark eyebrow over which you would lightly pass the third finger of your left hand but that it would soil the tip of it. You mourned the presence of the dead. You mourned the memory of the living. They call this rhythm the Blues. It reminded you of regret. It reminded you of a small white face suddenly thrown back against your arm with a smile that disturbed the dance. It reminded you of the desire that pleasantly turns to dust when you are desired. It reminded you of things you had never done with women you had never met. You danced again at the Ambassadeurs at Cannes, with the masts of yachts drawn ebony-black between the tall windows and the pale blue night over the sea. The Lido lay like a temptation before your mind, and the songs of the gondoliers raved into the measure of whispering feet. The Spanish King brushed by you at San Sebastian, eating salted almonds, again you hesitated in the dance at Biarritz to listen to the roar of the Atlantic, and across a perfumed street in Seville you again saw the shiver of a mantilla through the cracked window of a cabaret. You danced again beneath the vermilion moon of Algeria, between the American Bar and the pyramid-cypress tree. You danced again in the Bois in Paris, the trees like monstrous black pagodas against the night, the stars brilliant as sequins on an archangel’s floating cloak, the magically white faces of women, the lights in the night making love to the black shadows in their hair, their lips red as lobsters, their arm-pits clean as ivory, the men talking with facile gestures, the whole tapestry of