Then with the vision of honorable desire he imagined the body of her where it disappeared below the shoulders into the possession of the gown; he imagined with a certain awe what she must be like beneath all those long lines, those rounded surfaces, those eloquent wrinkles with their curious little pockets full of shadow, among the pools of light that satin shimmers with.

In other times and climes men had worn figured silks and satins and brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed sleeves, jeweled bonnets and curls, but now the male had surrendered to the female his prehistoric right to the fanciful plumage. These war days were grown so austere that it began to seem wrong even for women to dress with much more than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had removed the ban on extravagance.

The occasion justified the maximum display of jewelry, too, and Mamise wore all she had. She had taken her gems from their prison in the safe-deposit box in the Trust Company cellar. They seemed to be glad to be at home in the light again. They reveled in it, winking, laughing, playing a kind of game in which light chased light through the deeps of color.

The oddity of the feminine pa.s.sion for precious stones struck Davidge sharply. The man who built iron ships to carry freight wondered at the curious industry of those who sought out pebbles of price, and polished them, shaped them, faceted them, and fastened them in metals of studied design, petrified jellies that seemed to quiver yet defied steel.

He contrasted the cranes that would lift a locomotive and lower it into the hold of one of his ships with the tiny pincers with which a lapidary picked up a diamond fleck and sealed it in platinum. He contrasted the pneumatic riveter with the tiny hammers of the goldsmith. There seemed to be no less vanity about one than the other.

The work of the jeweler would outlast the iron hull. A diamond as large as a rivet-head would cost far more than a ship. Jewels, like sonnets and symphonies and flower-gardens, were good for nothing, yet somehow worth more than anything useful.

He wondered what the future would do to these arts and their patronesses. The one business of the world now was the manufacture, transportation, and efficient delivery of explosives.

He could understand how offensive bejeweled and banqueted people were to the humble, who went grimy and weary in dirty overalls over their plain clothes to their ugly factories and back to their uglier homes.

It was a consummation devoutly to be wished that n.o.body should spend his life or hers soiled and tired and f.a.gged with a monotonous task.

It seemed hard that the toiling woman and the wife and daughter of the toiler might not alleviate their bleak persons with pearl necklaces about their throats, with rubies pendant from their ears, and their fingers studded with sapphire and topaz.

Yet it did not look possible, somehow. And it seemed better that a few should have them rather than none at all, better that beauty should be allowed to reign somewhere than nowhere during its brief perfection.

And after all, what proof was there that the spoliation of the rich and the ending of riches would mean the enrichment of the poor?

When panics came and the rich fasted the poor starved. Would the reduction of the opulent and the elevation of the paupers all to the same plain average make anybody happier? Would the poor be glad to learn that they could never be rich? With n.o.body to envy, would contentment set in? With ambition rated as a crime, the bequeathing of comfort to one's children rendered impossible, the establishment of one's destiny left to the decision of boards and by-laws, would there be satisfaction? The Bolsheviki had voted "universal happiness."

It would be interesting to see how well Russia fared during the next year and how universally happiness might be distributed.

He frowned and shook his head as if to free himself from these nettlesome riddles and left them to the Bolshevist Samaritans to solve in the vast laboratory where the manual laborers at last could work out their hearts' desires, with the upper cla.s.s destroyed and the even more hateful middle cla.s.s at their mercy.

It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard Hotel, and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered in a voluminous sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship for the poor. Many men had sailed on a bitter voyage to arctic regions and endured every privation of cold and hunger and peril that this young woman might ride cozy in any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who clubbed the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier in the warm city shop, when he sold the finished garment, took in far more than the men who went out into the wilderness and brought back the pelts. That did not seem right; yet he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not create the market for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all for their voyage.

A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the industry, was beyond Davidge's imagining. He comforted himself with the thought that those loud mouths that advertised solutions of these labor problems were fools or liars or both; and their mouths were the tools they worked with most.

The important immediate thing to contemplate was the fascinating head of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk of a sea-lion.

CHAPTER III

Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not entirely neglected the new school of foot improvisation, so different from the old set steps.

Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man had so much of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened to the pipes of Pan and could "shake a sugar-heel" with a practised skill. There was a startling authority in the firmness with which he gathered her in and swept her through the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping, now limping, now running.

He gripped the savory body of Mamise close to him and found her to his whim, foreseeing it with a mysterious prescience. Holding her thus intimately in the brief wedlock of the dance, he began to love her in a way that he could think of only one word for--_terrible_.

She seemed to grow afraid, too, of the spell that was befogging them, and sought rescue in a flippancy. There was also a flattering spice of jealousy in what she murmured:

"You haven't spent all your afternoons and evenings building ships, young man!"

"No?"

"What cabarets have you graduated from?"

He quoted her own words, "Don't you wish you knew?"

"No."

"One thing is certain. I've never found in any of 'em as light a feather as you."

"Are you referring to my head or my feet?"

"Your blessed feet!"

His arm about her tightened to a suffocation, and he whirled her in a delirium of motion.

"That's unfair!" she protested, affrighted yet delighted by the fire of his ecstasy in their union. The music stopped, and she clung to him dizzily while he applauded with the other dancers till the band renewed the tune. She had regained her mental with her bodily equilibrium, and she danced more staidly; yet she had seen into the crater of his heart and was not sorry that it existed.

The reprise of the dance was brief, and he had to surrender her from his embrace. He was unwontedly rhapsodic. "I wish we could sail on and on and on forever."

"Forever is a long time," she smiled.

"May I have the next dance?"

"Certainly not! Take Polly round and pay for your supper. But don't--"

"Don't what?"

"I don't know."

Polly was taken for the next dance, and he was glad of it, but he suffered at seeing how perfectly Mamise footed it with a young officer who also knew how to compel her to his whim. Davidge wondered if Mamise could be responding to this fellow as keenly as she responded to himself. The thought was intolerable. She could not be so wanton. It would amount to a hideous infidelity. Moorish jealousy smoldered in his heart, and he cursed public dancing as an infamous, an unbelievable promiscuity. Yet when he had Polly Widdicombe for the next dance, her husband had no cause for jealousy. Polly was a temperate dancer, all gaiety, estheticism plus athleticism.

Davidge kept twisting his head about to see how Mamise comported herself. He was being swiftly wrung to that desperate condition in which men are made ready to commit monogamy. He felt that he could not endure to have Mamise free any longer.

He presented himself to her for the next dance.

She laughed. "I'm booked."

He blanched at the treacherous heartlessness and sat the dance out--stood it out, rather, among the superfluous men on the side-lines. A morose and ridiculous gloom possessed him at seeing still a fourth stranger with his arms about Mamise, her breast to his and her procedure obedient to his. Worse yet, when a fifth insolent stranger cut in on the twin stars, Mamise abandoned her fourth temporary husband for another with a levity that amounted to outrageous polyandry.

Davidge felt no impulse to cut in. He disliked dancing so intensely that he wanted to put an end to the abomination, reform it altogether.

He did not want to dance between those white arms so easily forsworn.

He wanted to rescue Mamise from this place of horror and hale her away to a cave with no outlook on mankind.

It was she who sought him where he glowered. Perhaps she understood him. If she did, she was wise enough to enjoy the proof of her sway over him and still sane enough to take a joy in her triumph.

She introduced her partner--Davidge would almost have called the brute a paramour. He did not get the man's name and was glad of it--especially as the hunter deserted her and went after his next Sabine.

"You've lost your faithful stenographer," was the first phrase of Mamise's that Davidge understood.

"Why so?" he grumbled.