"Do you suppose we'd get seen?"
Key considered.
"Maybe we better wait till they start drinkin' 'em.
They got 'em all laid out now, and they know how many of them there are."
They debated this point for several minutes.
Rose was all for getting his hands on a bottle now and tucking it under his coat before any one came into the room.
Key, however, advocated caution.
He was afraid he might get his brother in trouble.
If they waited till some of the bottles were opened it'd be all right to take one, and everybody'd think it was one of the college fellas.
While they were still engaged in argument George Key hurried through the room and, barely grunting at them, disappeared by way of the green baize door.
A minute later they heard several corks pop, and then the sound of cracking ice and splashing liquid. George was mixing the punch.
The soldiers exchanged delighted grins.
"Oh, boy!" whispered Rose.
George reappeared.
"Just keep low, boys," he said quickly.
"I'll have your stuff for you in five minutes."
He disappeared through the door by which he had come.
As soon as his footsteps receded down the stairs, Rose, after a cautious look, darted into the room of delights and reappeared with a bottle in his hand.
"Here's what I say," he said, as they sat radiantly digesting their first drink.
"We'll wait till he comes up, and we'll ask him if we can't just stay here and drink what he brings us --see.
We'll tell him we haven't got any place to drink it --see.
Then we can sneak in there whenever there ain't nobody in that there room and tuck a bottle under our coats.
We'll have enough to last us a coupla days --see?"
"Sure," agreed Rose enthusiastically.
"Oh, boy!
And if we want to we can sell it to sojers any time we want to."
They were silent for a moment thinking rosily of this idea.
Then Key reached up and unhooked the collar of his O. D. coat.
"It's hot in here, ain't it?"
Rose agreed earnestly.
"Hot as hell."
IV
She was still quite angry when she came out of the dressing-room and crossed the intervening parlor of politeness that opened onto the hall --angry not so much at the actual happening which was, after all, the merest commonplace of her social existence, but because it had occurred on this particular night.
She had no quarrel with herself.
She had acted with that correct mixture of dignity and reticent pity which she always employed.
She had succinctly and deftly snubbed him.
It had happened when their taxi was leaving the Biltmore --hadn't gone half a block.
He had lifted his right arm awkwardly --she was on his right side --and attempted to settle it snugly around the crimson fur-trimmed opera cloak she wore.
This in itself had been a mistake.
It was inevitably more graceful for a young man attempting to embrace a young lady of whose acquiescence he was not certain, to first put his far arm around her. It avoided that awkward movement of raising the near arm.
His second faux pas was unconscious.
She had spent the afternoon at the hairdresser's; the idea of any calamity overtaking her hair was extremely repugnant --yet as Peter made his unfortunate attempt the point of his elbow had just faintly brushed it.
That was his second faux pas.
Two were quite enough.
He had begun to murmur.
At the first murmur she had decided that he was nothing but a college boy --Edith was twenty-two, and anyhow, this dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding her, with the accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something else --of another dance and another man, a man for whom her feelings had been little more than a sad-eyed, adolescent mooniness.
Edith Bradin was falling in love with her recollection of Gordon Sterrett.
So she came out of the dressing-room at Delmonico's and stood for a second in the doorway looking over the shoulders of a black dress in front of her at the groups of Yale men who flitted like dignified black moths around the head of the stairs.
From the room she had left drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and fro of many scented young beauties --rich perfumes and the fragile memory-laden dust of fragrant powders.
This odor drifting out acquired the tang of cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensuously down the stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma Psi dance was to be held.