Page:Our Little Girl (1923).pdf/78

 a while, that is—at family celebrations or weddings or something where it wouldn’t be polite not to. I don’t like the stuff though, so what’s the use of forming a habit that can’t do you much good? I’m against Prohibition, but it really hasn’t made any difference to me, except that I’m offered more drinks in a day now than I used to get in a year.”

He looked about the floor. “Let’s dance.”

She noticed that Arnold didn’t clutch at her as tightly as the other young men on the floor clung to their partners. He didn’t even try to interlock fingers. A couple, dancing in such proximity that they might easily have been mistaken for the Siamese twins, collided with them.

“Pretty rough,” Arnold remarked. “And rougher than pretty.”

He almost stopped dancing after making this observation. Dorothy took the cue and laughed. Arnold resumed his evolutions happily.

Arnold’s dancing was lovely. He moved along springily and he felt comfortable. There was nothing too professional in his efforts. Possibly he gangled a trifle. She remembered a malicious comment from Tommy Borge: “Arnold talks like a dancer and dances like a conversationalist.” Tommy wasn’t usually mean. She wondered again what he could have against Arnold. On the other hand, Arnold plainly thought that Tommy was déclassé. Might this account for Tommy’s apophthegm that Arnold didn’t hob-nob; he hob-snobbed? Arnold had mentioned once that Tommy wasn’t light on his feet or anybody else’s. They seemed to be pretty good friends, too.

She considered all of these matters as Arnold rattled ‘on amiably of stocks and bonds and who was being married and how he had eluded a light heavyweight fortune hunter (female) at a recent party.