“There you go, Thor, making that speech you said you wouldn’t. I’m going to have a piece of that cake,” Bridie announced, “if it kills me.”

“I’d like to go to the dance,” Chris said. “To see it, anyway.”

“Why not? I’ll dance with you both, if nobody else does. I used to be a great dancer at the balls in—I used to be quite a dancer when I was a young fellow.”

Bridie threw him a penetrating glance. “I bet. Too bad Chris here was too late for those balls, and so on. I’d like to know what you think Barrow’s going to do for her education. It’s interesting, I ain’t saying it’s not, but what can a girl brought up like Chris was get out of it, only sight-seeing. Steak’s no treat for Chris. Or Eskimos, either. Now, the Legislature meeting in Juneau, and society and club movements in Anchorage and all that, that’s different, you learn something.”

Mildly, “You may be right, Bridie. But these were my two years with Christine. I wanted her to see it all, new Alaska and old Alaska. I think that this Barrow we’re seeing today, so near the North Pole, is a newer Alaska than anything Christine saw down in the Banana Belt.”

The meal finished, they stood a moment just outside the door, blinking in the blatant sunshine. The dance music came to them in the clear cold air. The street was strangely busy with figures passing to and fro, they did not loiter, it was as though they were intent on errands of importance. You heard the high clear voices of children at play.

“I ought to be sleepy,” Bridie said, “my age. But I ain’t.”

Chris pulled a deep breath into her lungs, exhaled it. “I feel just wonderful. Steak, I suppose, and coffee, and all that frightening cake.”

Thor beamed down on them, approvingly. “It’s only midnight. Just right for the dance.”

The dance hall was a long rough shed, the big room was dimmer than any Broadway danceland, red shades covered the electric globes. Boys in duck-tail haircuts and narrow cuffed pants and flamboyant shirts. Girls in bouffant skirts and flat little ballet slippers. They danced exactly as the boys and girls danced at midnight in San Francisco, and Chicago and New York. Between this Eskimo village and those famed cities there were four hours difference in time, five hours, six hours. Thousands of miles. They clung close, they flung their bodies about in the parabolas of acrobats, they stamped and postured. They disappeared into corners, they fled outside into the unkindly glare of the polar sun, they drank from bottles like California or Ohio or Connecticut young rebels in protest against a frightening world.

Chris had pushed back her parka hood. Her hair was like a light in that dim room. No one asked her to dance. The music was a phonograph blasting at full strength. “I’m a wallflower at nineteen.”

Thor made a courtly bow before her. “If I knew what they call whatever it is they’re dancing,” he said.