Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/245

 at the nice looking girls circling her; for they were nice looking—girls prettier and livelier and yet quite as "nice" looking as most at the Lovells' dance and more modestly dressed, the majority of them. Marjorie herself was, from her undress, as conspicuous as any one there. (Indeed, Sennen had censorship decolleté; and Mr. Saltro at first had had his doubts about his partner "passing" but had been too delicate to say so till he was certain that Sennen had seen her and passed her.)

The men were, most of them, nice looking, too; they were cruder, of course, but generally more energetic looking and more interested in life than the ex-college boys of the suburbs; and as they danced with the girls under Sennen's watchful eye, Marjorie realized that if she had come in merely to look on and had not offered herself for partner of Saltro and his friends, she scarcely would have suspected that anything in particular was going on, on the floor. But almost constantly in the arms of her partners, it proceeded, something so slight in physical manifestation, something so subtle and artful that Marjorie could protest against it as little as the ever watchful Sennen could object; for to protest, you must be able at least to describe what you forbid.

When Marjorie twisted her shoulders, endeavoring to escape it, always she felt it again in a moment. "Stop, please!" at last, she begged Mr. Saltro, after a series of these endeavors; he stopped dancing, actually unaware—Marjorie believed—that she could refer to anything but an accident.

"Somebody hurt your foot?" he questioned.

Again it was for her to go ahead or abandon the experience she had undertaken; the other girls, who