This is all very well from their point of view, but it means that, in order
to keep up with them and get your money's worth out of the last trick you
learned, it is necessary during its brief life of respectability to dance
at every available opportunity. You dance as many nights a week as is
physically possible; you dance on week-days and you dance on Sundays; you
begin dancing in the afternoon and you dance during tea in the coffee-rooms
of expensive restaurants, whirling your precarious way through littered and
abandoned tea-tables; and at dinner-time you leap up madly before the fish
and dance like variety artistes in a highly-polished arena before a crowd
of complete strangers eating their food; or, as if seized with an
uncontrollable craving for the dance, you fling out after the joint for one
wild gallop in an outer room, from which you return, perspiring and
dyspeptic, to the consumption of an ice-pudding, before dashing forth to
the final orgy at a picture-gallery, where the walls are appropriately
covered with pictures of barbaric women dressed for the hot weather.
That is what happened at this dinner. As soon as you had started a nice
conversation with a lady a sort of roaring was heard without; her eyes
gleamed, her nostrils quivered like a horse planning a gallop, and in the
middle of one of your best sentences she simply faded away with some
horrible man at the other end of the table who was probably "the only man
in London who can do the Double Straddle properly.
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