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I turned to Mrs Charlie. ‘There,’ I said, ‘don’t you want to win a Love-r-ly Silver Cup?’

‘But I couldn’t.’

‘You never know your luck.’

‘But it isn’t luck. Didn’t you hear him say it’s a contest decided purely by skill?’

‘Well, try your skill, then.’ I felt as if I could have shaken her. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ I said, ‘show a little grit. Aren’t you going to stir a finger to keep your Charlie? Suppose you win, think what it will mean. He will look up to you for the rest of your life. When he starts talking about New York, all you will have to say is, “New York? Ah, yes, that was the town I won that Love-r-ly Silver Cup in, was it not?” and he’ll drop as if you had hit him behind the ear with a sandbag. Pull yourself together and try.’

I saw those brown eyes of hers flash, and she said, ‘I’ll try.’

‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Now you get those tears dried, and fix yourself up, and I’ll go down and get the tickets.’

Izzy was mighty relieved when I bore down on him.

‘Gee!’ he said, ‘I thought you had run away, or was sick or something. Here’s your ticket.’

‘I want two, Izzy. One’s for a friend of mine. And I say, Izzy, I’d take it as a personal favour if you would let her stop on the floor as one of the last two couples. There’s a reason. She’s a kid from the country, and she wants to make a hit.’

‘Sure, that’ll be all right. Here are the tickets. Yours is thirty-six, hers is ten.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Don’t go mixing them.’

I went back to the balcony. On the way I got hold of Charlie.

‘We’re dancing this together,’ I said.

He grinned all across his face.

I found Mrs Charlie looking as if she had never shed a tear in her life. She certainly had pluck, that kid.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Stick to your ticket like wax and watch your step.’

I guess you’ve seen these sporting contests at Geisenheimer’s. Or, if you haven’t seen them at Geisenheimer’s, you’ve seen them somewhere else. They’re all the same.

When we began, the floor was so crowded that there was hardly elbow-room. Don’t tell me there aren’t any optimists nowadays. Everyone was looking as if they were wondering whether to have the Love-r-ly Cup in the sitting-room or the bedroom. You never saw such a hopeful gang in your life.

Presently Izzy gave tongue. The management expects him to be humorous on these occasions, so he did his best.

‘Num-bahs, seven, eleven, and twenty-one will kindly rejoin their sorrowing friends.’

This gave us a little more elbow-room, and the band started again.

A few minutes later, Izzy once more: ‘Num-bahs thirteen, sixteen, and seventeen–good-bye.’

Off we went again.

‘Num-bah twelve, we hate to part with you, but–back to your table!’

A plump girl in a red hat, who had been dancing with a kind smile, as if she were doing it to amuse the children, left the floor.

‘Num-bahs six, fifteen, and twenty, thumbs down!’

And pretty soon the only couples left were Charlie and me, Mrs Charlie and the fellow I’d introduced her to, and a bald-headed man and a girl in a white hat. He was one of your stick-at-it performers. He had been dancing all the evening. I had noticed him from the balcony. He looked like a hard-boiled egg from up there.

He was a trier all right, that fellow, and had things been otherwise, so to speak, I’d have been glad to see him win. But it was not to be. Ah, no!

‘Num-bah nineteen, you’re getting all flushed. Take a rest.’

So there it was, a straight contest between me and Charlie and Mrs Charlie and her man. Every nerve in my system was tingling with suspense and excitement, was it not? It was not.

Charlie, as I’ve already hinted, was not a dancer who took much of his attention off his feet while in action. He was there to do his durnedest, not to inspect objects of interest by the wayside. The correspondence college he’d attended doesn’t guarantee to teach you to do two things at once. It won’t bind itself to teach you to look round the room while you’re dancing. So Charlie hadn’t the least suspicion of the state of the drama. He was breathing heavily down my neck in a determined sort of way, with his eyes glued to the floor. All he knew was that the competition had thinned out a bit, and the honour of Ashley, Maine, was in his hands.