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Mary had been gazing very intently at the nice-looking one over there who was dancing with the girl in grey. She answered her mother’s question, still gazing at him. “They call them gigolos,” she said, slowly. Then, “Get that one Dad, will you, if you can? You dance with him first, Mother, and then I’ll—-“

“I can get two,” volunteered Orson J.

“No,” said Mary Hubbell, sharply.

The nice-looking gigolo seemed to be in great demand, but Orson J. succeeded in capturing him after the third dance. It turned out to be a tango, and though Mrs. Hubbell, pretty well scared, declared that she didn’t know it and couldn’t dance it, the nice-looking gigolo assured her, through the medium of Mary’s interpretation, that Mrs. Hubbell had only to follow his guidance. It was quite simple. He did not seem to look directly at Mary, or at Orson J. or at Mrs. Hubbell, as he spoke. The dance concluded, Mrs. Hubbell came back breathless, but enchanted.

“He has beautiful manners,” she said, aloud, in English. “And dance! You feel like a swan when you’re dancing with him. Try him, Mary.” The gigolo’s face, as he bowed before her, was impassive, inscrutable.

But, “Sh!” said Mary.

“Nonsense! Doesn’t understand a word.”

Mary danced the next dance with him. They danced wordlessly until the dance was half over. Then, abruptly, Mary said in English, “What’s your name?”

Close against him she felt a sudden little sharp contraction of the gigolo’s diaphragm–the contraction that reacts to surprise or alarm. But he said, in French, “Pardon?”

So, “What’s your name?” said Mary, in French this time.

The gigolo with the beautiful manners hesitated longer than really beautiful manners should permit. But finally, “Je m’appelle Gedeon Gore.” He pronounced it in his most nasal, perfect Paris French. It didn’t sound even remotely like Gideon Gory.

“My name’s Hubbell,” said Mary, in her pretty fair French. “Mary Hubbell. I come from a little town called Winnebago.”

The Gore eyebrow expressed polite disinterestedness.

“That’s in Wisconsin,” continued Mary, “and I love it.”

“Naturellement,” agreed the gigolo, stiffly.

They finished the dance without further conversation. Mrs. Hubbell had the next dance. Mary the next. They spent the afternoon dancing, until dinner time. Orson J.’s fee, as he handed it to the gigolo, was the kind that mounted grandly into dollars instead of mere francs. The gigolo’s face, as he took it, was not more inscrutable than Mary’s as she watched him take it.

From that afternoon, throughout the next two weeks, if any girl as thoroughly fine as Mary Hubbell could be said to run after any man, Mary ran after that gigolo. At the same time one could almost have said that he tried to avoid her. Mary took a course of tango lessons, and urged her mother to do the same. Even Orson J. noticed it.

“Look here,” he said, in kindly protest. “Aren’t you getting pretty thick with this jigger?”

“Sociological study, Dad. I’m all right.”

“Yeh, you’re all right. But how about him?”

“He’s all right, too.”

The gigolo resisted Mary’s unmaidenly advances, and yet, when he was with her, he seemed sometimes to forget to look sombre and blank and remote. They seemed to have a lot to say to each other. Mary talked about America a good deal. About her home town … “and big elms and maples and oaks in the yard … the Fox River valley … Middle West … Normal Avenue … Cass Street … Fox River paper mills….”

She talked in French and English. The gigolo confessed, one day, to understanding some English, though he seemed to speak none. After that Mary, when very much in earnest, or when enthusiastic, spoke in her native tongue altogether. She claimed an intense interest in European after-war conditions, in reconstruction, in the attitude toward life of those millions of young men who had actually participated in the conflict. She asked questions that might have been considered impertinent, not to say nervy.

“Now you,” she said, brutally, “are a person of some education, refinement, and background. Yet you are content to dance around in these–these–well, back home a chap might wash dishes in a cheap restaurant or run an elevator in an east side New York loft building, but he’d never—-“