Ngadjiwa was a gayer place than Labuwangi: there was a garrison; managers and employers often came down from the coffee-plantations in the interior for a few days' amusement; there were races twice a year, accompanied by festivities which filled a whole month: the reception of the resident, a horse-raffle, a battle of flowers and an opera, two or three balls, distinguished by the revellers as the fancy-dress ball, the ceremonial ball and the soirée dansante; it was a time of early rising and late retiring, of losing hundreds of guilders in a few days at écarté and in the totalizator.... The longing for pleasure and the cheery joy of life were freely indulged during those days; coffee-planters and young men from the sugar-factories looked forward to them for months ahead; people saved up for them during half the year. The two hotels were filled with guests from all directions, every household entertained its visitors; people betted furiously, while champagne flowed in torrents, all, including the ladies, knowing the race-horses as thoroughly as though they were their own property, feeling quite at home at the dances, everybody knowing everybody, as at family-parties, while the waltzes and Washington Posts and grazianas were danced with the languorous grace of the Eurasian dancers, to a swooning measure, the trains gently floating, a smile of quiet rapture on the parted lips, with that dreamy voluptuousness which the Indian settlers express so charmingly in their dances, especially those who have Javanese blood in their veins. Dancing with them is not a rough diversion, all bumping against one another with rude leaps and loud laughter, not the wild whirl of the Lancers as at Dutch boy-and-girl balls, but represents, especially to the Eurasians, nothing but courtesy and grace: a serene blossoming of the poetry of motion; a gracefully designed curve of precise steps to a pure measure over the club-room floors; an almost eighteenth-century harmony of youthful nobility, waving and trailing and swaying in the dance, despite the primitive boom-booming of the Indian musicians. This was how Addie de Luce danced, with the eyes of every woman and girl fixed upon him, following him, imploring him with their glances to take them with him also in that waving and undulating motion; which was like a dream upon the water.... This came to him with his mother's blood, this was a survival of the grace of the dancing princesses among whom his mother had spent her childhood; and the mingling of modern European and ancient Javanese gave him an irresistible charm.