Mimi laughed.
“I don’t know about that. See that nice-looking chap over there in that box? I’ve never seen him before and he asked me if I wanted to dance with him.”
Mrs. Rogers peered in the direction of Mimi’s nod.
“No, you haven’t seen him,” she told Mimi grimly, when she had located him. “He’s probably one of the most notorious gamblers in New York—has never been known to do a lick of work. I told you you’d see all sorts of people here, didn’t I?”
The music began again and there was a wild rush to the dance floor. Mimi sat and watched the kaleidoscopic scene, brilliant, colourful, fascinating. New York is the only place on earth where such a crowd could be got together, she mused. Like one body the crowd on the huge, densely packed floor swayed and moved with an easy grace, laughing, carefree, exuberant. There was a natural spontaneity to the movement, a rhythmic unity that gave Mimi the impression that the dancers had been rehearsed with great pains by an expert maître de danse . They moved with graceful animation, with a decorous but fascinating abandon. Her aunt was speaking.
“It’s lucky for the Negro he was given the ability to forget—there are at least a dozen people down there I’ve recognized who probably don’t know where they’ll get money enough to pay their rent. Yet there’s not a soul having a better time than they. He can work all day methodically and steadily as long as he knows there will be opportunities to forget harsh and unpleasant things.” …
Mimi did not see Mrs. Plummer as she descended the stairs when the music began for the next dance. That estimable person had come that afternoon to New York and she now was receiving her first glimpse of