It was an odor she knew well, exciting, stimulating, restlessly sweet --the odor of a fashionable dance.
She thought of her own appearance.
Her bare arms and shoulders were powdered to a creamy white.
She knew they looked very soft and would gleam like milk against the black backs that were to silhouette them tonight.
The hairdressing had been a success; her reddish mass of hair was piled and crushed and creased to an arrogant marvel of mobile curves.
Her lips were finely made of deep carmine; the irises of her eyes were delicate, breakable blue, like china eyes.
She was a complete, infinitely delicate, quite perfect thing of beauty, flowing in an even line from a complex coiffure to two small slim feet.
She thought of what she would say to-night at this revel, faintly prestiged already by the sounds of high and low laughter and slippered footsteps, and movements of couples up and down the stairs.
She would talk the language she had talked for many years --her line --made up of the current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung together into an intrinsic whole, careless, faintly provocative, delicately sentimental.
She smiled faintly as she heard a girl sitting on the stairs near her say:
"You don't know the half of it, dearie!"
And as she smiled her anger melted for a moment, and closing her eyes she drew in a deep breath of pleasure.
She dropped her arms to her side until they were faintly touching the sleek sheath that covered and suggested her figure.
She had never felt her own softness so much nor so enjoyed the whiteness of her own arms.
"I smell sweet," she said to herself simply, and then came another thought --"I'm made for love."
She liked the sound of this and thought it again; then in inevitable succession came her new-born riot of dreams about Gordon.
The twist of her imagination which, two months before, had disclosed to her her unguessed desire to see him again, seemed now to have been leading up to this dance, this hour.
For all her sleek beauty, Edith was a grave, slow-thinking girl.
There was a streak in her of that same desire to ponder, of that adolescent idealism that had turned her brother socialist and pacifist.
Henry Bradin had left Cornell, where he had been an instructor in economics, and had come to New York to pour the latest cures for incurable evils into the columns of a radical weekly newspaper.
Edith, less fatuously, would have been content to cure Gordon Sterrett.
There was a quality of weakness in Gordon that she wanted to take care of; there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to protect.
And she wanted someone she had known a long while, someone who had loved her a long while.
She was a little tired; she wanted to get married.
Out of a pile of letters, half a dozen pictures and as many memories, and this weariness, she had decided that next time she saw Gordon their relations were going to be changed.
She would say something that would change them.
There was this evening.
This was her evening.
All evenings were her evenings.
Then her thoughts were interrupted by a solemn undergraduate with a hurt look and an air of strained formality who presented himself before her and bowed unusually low.
It was the man she had come with, Peter Himmel.
He was tall and humorous, with horned-rimmed glasses and an air of attractive whimsicality.
She suddenly rather disliked him --probably because he had not succeeded in kissing her.
"Well," she began, "are you still furious at me?"
"Not at all."
She stepped forward and took his arm.
"I'm sorry," she said softly.
"I don't know why I snapped out that way.
I'm in a bum humor to-night for some strange reason.
I'm sorry."
"S'all right," he mumbled, "don't mention it."
He felt disagreeably embarrassed.
Was she rubbing in the fact of his late failure?
"It was a mistake," she continued, on the same consciously gentle key. "We'll both forget it."
For this he hated her.
A few minutes later they drifted out on the floor while the dozen swaying, sighing members of the specially hired jazz orchestra informed the crowded ballroom that "if a saxophone and me are left alone why then two is com-pan-ee!"
A man with a mustache cut in.
"Hello," he began reprovingly. "You don't remember me."
"I can't just think of your name," she said lightly --"and I know you so well."
"I met you up at --" His voice trailed disconsolately off as a man with very fair hair cut in.