The dark backs and bare shoulders of men and girls greeted us upon entering the dance. Papa and Mama and I stood on the polished steps of the entrance hall before descending, and oh, how I wanted to plunge in, to feel the glances on my bare arms, to greet the nodding heads among the sudden spray of laughter and bright conversation. The butler bent to hear Papa’s whispered instructions, then called out into the crowded room.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow Thomas. Miss Maisie Thomas.”

I noted the Misses Peabody and their confederate, Miss Nash, turning in unison to get a better look as we passed through the room, and I imagined they thought Mama to have stepped clear from a milk bath, so soft and fresh she appeared. In a rich cream silk, she flowed at Papa’s side, nodding hello, the diamonds sparkling in her dark hair.

I felt a little stiff, a new birch beside my mother’s dancing beauty. I caught a glimpse of Bart Hunnowell walking among the white-clad girls like a shepherd. And as if he had heard my inward comparison, he stopped to tend to some remark of Cynthia Harrington’s, holding her dance card while she prettily pointed out the names.

Bart smiled and then excused himself, walking through the crowd toward the darkened verandah steps and the night. The room shivered in the light of a hundred tapers. Suddenly, he was caught in the twirling patterns as several couples eddied around him as though he had been pulled into a quickening current, and he propelled himself through the swirl and out into the cooler quiet of the hall, out to the darkened verandah steps, where he vanished from my sight.

And now the gaiety behind him surged forward, racing us toward midnight on the wave of the dance. A combination was proposed in which the men danced the part of the ladies and the ladies took the lead, and the result was a laughing excuse to trip over one another while the men’s ungloved hands rested on the bare shoulders of the girls. There was an outdoor supper on the verandah at twelve o’clock, and the moon glanced between the silver forks and knives and sparkled in the punch, all the while dancing also in the darker harbor waters. All the windows in the front rooms were thrown wide to the night and as the air chilled into the early morning, the music played there grew more heated, as though Mrs. Strong’s fiddlers had exchanged their bows for pokers dipping again and again into their music’s lively fire.