She had no experience of the discipline of society; she understood only crude impulses of nature; she never believed that he would dare approach her. He came directly to her, offered his hand with perfect courtesy, gave a formal greeting, bowed and left her immediately. She was so taken by surprise by the ease with which he had surmounted a difficult moment that she suffered him to take her hand and to depart without the slightest resistance. But immediately afterward her anger flamed up. What! not a word of excuse, not a regret, nothing but a trivial evasion! And forgetting all her own resolves, she flung herself recklessly into the excitement of the evening, recklessly resolved to make herself a thousand times more desirable, to outdo even the most daring of the dancers, to draw on herself every regard, that he might see to what he had driven her. He continued to watch her, transformed into a spectator, arms folded, seeing no one else; and with a keen cutting joy she saw the furrow of pain and doubt which gathered across his brow, as she abandoned herself, head thrown back, laughing up at her partner, as she had seen Georgie Gwynne once in the embrace of Lindaberry. The men, already over-excited, crowded about her, contending for each dance. Now she no longer avoided Massingale's troubled gaze. Each time she passed near him, she sent him a scornful veiled glance, a smile of derision and recklessness, which said: "There--you see! This is what you have done to me; this is where I am going!" A fury impelled her on; she wished to drive him, at all costs, from the room. But still he remained rooted by the piano, never averting his eyes. She saw that he suffered, and by every coqueting provoking glance, by every seductive movement of her body, by the very vertigo of her languorous, half closed eyes and parted eager lips, she sought to bury deeper the sting. Lindaberry sought her, among others, and she danced with him once, twice, a third time, granting him that personal distinction which would double the pain she was inflicting. This evening Lindaberry was different. She felt in him an agitation equal to her own. He danced extraordinarily well, with an impulsive sense of the alternately controlled or passionately rebellious movements of the dance. And the impulses within him which subdued her movements to his, fiercely checking them or suddenly enveloping her in a mad, surging, frantic rush which left her breathless, was something not of the room, or the mechanics of the step, but an inner fierce revolt that sought its liberating expression in this physical madness. Even in her obsession of resentment, she felt a curiosity to know why this was so. Other men enlightened her, whispering caution: "For God's sake, Miss Baxter, don't let him drink any more!" "He's been on a spree for a week!" "They say he lost forty thousand last night at Canfield's."