The crowds streaked off with the last chord--veering from the center maëlstrom in tangents of silk and strutting black, subsiding once more in little puddles of voice and posture. As Quincy passed, he felt about him the heat of barely mastered sex slakishly a-stir beneath its gossamer guards of dress and of convention; he caught the shrill flush of the repressed and the unconscious, fretting the smooth lines of talk and rendering cramped the lissome carriage of these bodies. Though his eyes saw no soil, no awkwardness, it was as if he felt the presence of a creamy silk smutted with sweat, or of a gentle drapery tortured from shape by some protrusion. Then he almost ran into Clarice. She was far more surprised as their hands clasped, than he. For she had changed more. And this was her domain. He had kissed her, so of course she recalled everything about him. He who had been, remained like a crystal in her memory. This Quincy, she knew. Of no other Quincy had she the slightest cognizance. So she was really amazed, finding him in this new strange milieu that was her own, who in her mind could never change from the wild boy of nearly four years past. This flash from her old self had an effect almost as intimate as if his embrace and talk had actually been repeated, there in the glitter of the ball. And as she must have rebuffed any advance at such a time, so now she turned cold and hot for Quincy, from no reason more real than the reality of her recollections. But if Clarice was disturbed by the old spirit--all she caught,--Quincy was dazed by the new, outer form. And this was the more unwieldly, so that, in a trice, she was the master. Close on her impulse to fend him off for having ventured an old impression in so unapt and new a place, came a desire to attach to him, a nostalgia for her old self whom he had known. In him, she could enjoy this glint of herself at seventeen. For there was the lad she had played with! Her proper partners would not see her metamorphosis. She could be the old Clarice, as this stiff young man was the old Quincy. Her technique of delusion--her need of it--was sharp enough for far harder, less true games. And so it was that in the blare of a waltz on a crowded floor, Quincy was seen more truly than he would see himself that night, at home, surrounded by the pretensions that he dared not give up. Clarice cut back to their last talk, once they were alone. Quincy tried bravely to show in the words he spoke that he had changed. And Clarice laughed him out quite as she had laughed out his older pretensions. Thus, they fared well together. And with another dance, filched like the first from one of the proper partners, she invited him to call.