repugnant to me and that to this day I have always carefully avoided and utterly despised, a smooth and stereotyped world of marble-topped tables, jazz music, cocottes and commercial travellers! Sadly, I swallowed my tea and stared at the crowd of second-rate elegance. Two beautiful girls caught my eye. They were both good dancers. I followed their movements with admiration and envy. How elastic, how beautiful and gay and certain their steps!
Soon Hermine appeared once more. She was not pleased with me. She scolded me and said that I was not there to wear such a face and sit idling at tea-tables. I was to pull myself together, please, and dance. What, I knew no one? That was not necessary. Were there, then, no girls there who met with my approval?
I pointed out one of the two, and the more attractive, who happened at the moment to be standing near us. She looked enchanting in her pretty velvet dress with her short luxuriant blonde hair and her rounded womanly arms. Hermine insisted that I should go up to her forthwith and ask her to dance. I shrank back in despair.
“Indeed, I cannot do it,” I said in my misery. “Of course, if I were young and good-looking—but for a stiff old hack like me who can’t dance for the life of him—she would laugh at me!”
Hermine looked at me contemptuously.
“And that I should laugh at you, of course, doesn’t matter. What a coward you are! Everyone risks being laughed at when he addresses a girl. That’s always at stake. So take the risk, Harry, and if the worst come to the worst let yourself be laughed at. Otherwise it’s all up with my belief in your obedience. …”
She was obdurate. I got up automatically and approached the young beauty just as the music began again.