Page:The Prussian officer, and other stories, Lawrence, 1914.djvu/250

 and touching his ears, whilst she was roused to another man. It made the blood flame over him.

At that moment Sam Adams appeared, florid and boisterous, intoxicated more with himself, with the dancing, than with wine. In his eye the curious, impersonal light gleamed.

“I thought I should find you here, Elsie,” he cried boisterously, a disturbing, high note in his voice.

“What made you think so?” she replied, the mischief rousing in her.

The florid, well-built man narrowed his eyes to a smile.

“I should never look for you among the ladies,” he said, with a kind of intimate, animal call to her. He laughed, bowed, and offered her his arm.

“Madam, the music waits.”

She went almost helplessly, carried along with him, unwilling, yet delighted.

That dance was an intoxication to her. After the first few steps, she felt herself slipping away from herself. She almost knew she was going, she did not even want to go. Yet she must have chosen to go. She lay in the arm of the steady, close man with whom she was dancing, and she seemed to swim away out of contact with the room, into him. She had passed into another, denser element of him, an essential privacy. The room was all vague around her, like an atmosphere, like under sea, with a flow of ghostly, dumb movements. But she herself was held real against her partner, and it seemed she was connected with him, as if the movements of his body and limbs were her own movements, yet not