The dance at the Willow Roads Country Club took place the night before Terry O'Brien's trial. Watts, with some feeling of wanting the life pulses of the Minga Bunch about him, went leisurely down the mountain road clad in the golf tweeds against which a club dance would not discriminate. As he looked in through the long windows that opened on the river, the lawyer was thinking that the indiscretions and bold franchises of the youth of the day were somehow, though coarser, a less harmful thing than the evasions and concealments of earlier days. One thing the man, staring in upon the throngs watching the little cubs of the "stag line" with their important faces, noting the calm, inexpressive faces of the girls, would have asked for--enthusiasm. Watts reviewed the whole history of the dance, Bacchante and stately minuet and folk dance, gigue and morrice, and wondered what good the dance was without the laughing lips, the light of the eyes, the merry face. He saw the young figures of the girls coming down the staircase, faces washed of all human expression, calm, subtle, in some instances of a Cleopatra-like Eastern subtlety, but never gay. The tall, dark man, accustomed to reading faces, wondered if indeed gayety had gone out of the world. "Gayety," thought Watts, "means innocence. Perhaps in a machine-run world there can be no innocence." Down the staircase they came, scarlet and white satin, blue tulle, black tulle, pretty gold and silver slippers. Little necks filmy with powder, smooth heads, coiled, puffed and banded, long white arms, smooth white sides visible to the waist. Feet and legs devoid of grace, thickened by athletics and crudely pushed and planted in the unlovely strutting dances, yet not so unnatural, not so different, just young things pushed about by the great Energy--Life. Any ballroom, the lawyer knew, spells but one thing. In spite of its protected, assured air, its look of flowered convention and jeweled dames playing propriety, it is, in all truth, the scene of the play of young blood, the attraction of young creatures. Since the days of the excitement over Byron's "Waltz" the eternal comment of men and women, wall-flowers and chaperons evades this evident truth and registers the same objection to all that is not sentimental convention. But ballrooms go on existing. Watts, with a smile, wondered how many dances were in full blast along the Hudson River, so many fields of flower-pollen flying that Friday night. His mind wandered back over the fair old stately days of the great mansions of the early Americans. He thought about Colonial dances up and down this river, visualized homes along the great stream, the time of Cooper's "Satanstoe," of Irving's homesteads, of belles of the Revolution and the days of Lincoln. Shipman, with his own peculiar imagination, reviewed the youth and beauty of those days when, we are told, youth was so pure and innocent, beauty so lovely and soft and mild and biddable.