WORLD'S END

Anyhow, there were the two young persons on the floor, and an extraordinary thing happened. Lanny hadn't had a real dance since coming to the land of the pilgrims' pride, and he had missed it. The dancing that was done at the club was so subdued that it amounted to little more than taking a lady in your arms and walking about the room with her, backing her for a while and then reversing and letting her back you. People did this to the pounding of ragtime music which exercised a hypnotic effect, so that you might have been watching a roomful of automatons, electrically controlled so that they didn't bump into one another as they wove here and there.

But if you are young and full of fire you can dance fast and freely to any music. You can take three steps while others are taking one; you can bend and turn and leap - in short you can express the joy that is in you. And if you have in front of you a girl who is the very soul of motion, who watches you with excitement in her eyes, and reads in your face what you are going to do - that is something to wake you up and get you going. A few tentative steps, a few quick words, and the two bodies were swaying together, they were bringing grace and charm into being - they were creating a dance.

The watching ladies of course had seen dancing on the stage; there was a thing known as "society dancing," all the rage just then. But that dancing was carefully rehearsed; whereas these two young creatures had never seen each other before, and you could see that they were inventing something to express their pleasure in the meeting. It was stimulating, indeed it was almost improper - and that is what it became when the story started on its thousand-legged way through the city of Newcastle.

Was Gracyn Phillipson really what she seemed to Lanny that afternoon? Did joy really bubble up in her like water in a mountain spring? Lanny gave no thought to the question, and would have had no means of getting the answer. If Gracyn was acting - well, it meant that she was an actress. And surely nobody was expecting her to write A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

After the dancing there was tea, and this alert young creature revealed that it was the hope of her life to get on the stage. Mrs. Jessup had told her about the play that the club was producing, and she said that she would be tremendously honored by a chance to appear in it. Yes, she knew a little about the part of Puck; she had loved Shakespeare since childhood. Miss Phillipspn didn't exactly say that she carried an assortment of Shakespearean roles about in her head; and of course there was the possibility that she had sat up most of the night learning Puck.

Anyhow, when Mrs. Jessup said: "Could you give us an idea of how you would do it?" the answer came promptly: "I'd be glad to, if it wouldn't bore you." No shyness, no inhibition; she was an actress. Right there in the main room of the clubhouse, with other ladies sipping tea or playing bridge, and gentlemen passing through with their golf bags, Gracyn Phillipson enacted the scene in which Puck replies to the orders of King Oberon to torment the lovers: "My fairy lord, this must be done with haste."

Presently came the place where Demetrius enters, wandering in the forest. Lanny being Demetrius, Gracyn gave him a sign, and he recited his challenge to his rival. Puck answered in the rival's voice, taunting him:

"Thou coward, art thou bragging to the stars, Telling the bushes that thou look'st for wars, And wilt not come?"

Gracyn managed to produce the voice of an angry man from somewhere in her throat. She put such energy and conviction into the playful scene that ladies at the tables put down their tea cups or cards, and gentlemen rested their golf bags against the wall and stood and listened. Everybody could see at once that this was an actress; but why on earth was she exhibiting herself at the Newcastle Country Club?

V

Rumor with its thousand tongues took up the tidings that Robbie Budd's son had interested himself in a high-school girl, and was trying to oust Adelaide Hitchcock from the role of Puck and to put his protйgйe in her place. He had had this protйgйe at the club and had danced with her and played a scene with her, and now the dramatics committee was requested to give her a chance to show what she could do. Lanny was calling it a matter of "art"; the thousand tongues each said that word with a different accent, indicative of subtle shadings of incredulity and amusement. "Art, indeed! Art, no less! Art, if you please! Art, art - to be sure, oh, yes, naturally, I don't think!"

The rumor came to Adelaide Hitchcock in the first half-hour. She rushed to her mother in tears. Oh, the insult, the humiliation-making her ridiculous before the whole town, ruining her for life! "I told them I was no actress; but they said I could do it, they made me go and learn all those silly verses and take all that trouble getting fitted with a dress!"