Although they took the floor early in the dance, when only two other couples had begun to dance, it was impossible for her to be nervous within his arm. Half the room gazed at her, for she had attracted attention from the first. She knew that half the room was gazing at her, and she liked it. She guessed that half the room was saying: "Look at that fresh young creature who’s with that middle-aged man--she must be really very young." And she liked it. She liked to show herself with the man who was more than old enough to be her father, worn by knowledge and experience and the corrupting of the world; to contrast her untried simplicity--the bloom of the virginal scarcely gone from it--with his grey hairs and his wrinkled, disillusioned, passive eyes. She was happy in the thought that everybody knew that she must have given herself to him, and that there was something strange, sinister, and even odious in her abandonment. He had used the word "perverse." She did not wholly understand the word, but it appealed to her, and for her it expressed her mood.
She had noticed, in the room, how the women no longer unquestionably young were more consciously and carefully charming towards their men, receiving adulation but rendering it back; whereas the unquestionably young were more negligent and far more egotistic. And so she behaved like one no longer unquestionably young. She glanced up at her partner with ravishing, ecstatic smiles; she publicly adored him. And she was glad that her green and gold frock with its long arm-holes was not of the Wigmore Street cut, but quite other in origin and spirit and in its effect upon the imagination.
The dancing had by this time become general, but the olive-tinted temptresses were still prominent in the throng, and sometimes she touched them in the curves of the dance. She knew where they beat her and where she beat them. And it was vouchsafed to her from the eyes of Felix that she was lovely and marvellous. She felt intensely, inexpressibly happy, and more than happy--triumphant. Her quiet, obstinate resentment against the domestic policy of her father died out, and she forgave him as she danced. She thought with a secret sigh almost painful in its relief: