He held her very reverently and loosely, though dimly aware that this made things much more difficult, but he could not bring himself to seize that soft and altogether sacred form in the kind of intimate clutch which the other men affected⁠—Stephen, he noticed, included. It was a maddening complexity of emotion, that dance⁠—the incredible awe and rapture of holding his adored, however lightly, in his arms, the intoxication of her nearness the fragrance of her dress, and the touch of her hair upon his face⁠—and all this ruined by the exasperating futility of the actual dance, the vile necessity of thinking whether he was in time with the music and in time with Muriel, and if he was going to run into the couple ahead, and if there was room to reverse in that corner, and whether he should cock his leg up farther, or not so far, or not at all. He envied bitterly the easy accomplishment of the circling youths about him, who, for all the earnestness of their expressions, had each of them, no doubt, time to appreciate the fact that they held on their arms some warm and lovely girl.