Here again, but more than ever now, was the hero out of Homer—Hector or Achilles—or Lancelot (far more than Galahad), Siegfried, Jason of the Argonauts, who had been his boyhood companions. A thousand times he had sailed in the windy Argo over the wine-­dark sea, eaten with, slept with, fought with and loved with the men of that manly and various crew. Here was one of them now, the epitome of them all, who in another moment would step forward and call him familiarly “Johnnie.”

As he waited for the anthem to end, the expression on his young unself­conscious face was one of strained, almost worried, respect; but the general impression he created was something else again. In his most extravagant flight of vanity or eagerness to please, Cliff Hauman could not have begun to calculate the full effect he had produced. The white made him look even larger than he was; he glowed in the doorway like a figure abstract, luminous, and mythical.

The band came to the finish; with scarcely a pause it broke into a lively dance tune. Hauman stepped forward, and for the moment was lost in the crowd of young men and girls who came to life at once in a swirling mass.

“Here comes Bill Howard,” Ethel said. “Will you ask Mrs. Howard to dance with you?”

But when he approached her, Sarah Howard said: “You don’t want to dance, you’re just being polite. I don’t want to, either. Let’s sit it out.”

From chairs at the side they watched the bouncing frenzied crowd. A young sailor jitterbugged by himself in front of them, while his partner performed the exact same gyrations a couple of feet away; when they came together, it was with the force of a blow. Bill Howard and Ethel passed, their reserve a strange contrast to the modern antics all around them. In the center of the room, his tawny head towering above the others, Cliff Hauman could be seen bobbing happily up and down; Billie, her eyes shut, nestled against the broad white chest, oblivious to everyone but her husband.

“Do you know what this reminds me of?” Sarah Howard said. “I can’t get it out of my mind:

“ ‘There was a sound of revelry by night,

And Belgium’s capital had gathered then

Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright

The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men . . .’

I suppose that sounds pretty sophomoric to you,” she added.

“Indeed it doesn’t. Do you know how it goes on?”

Sarah Howard gave a small laugh. “I think I do, though I never thought I’d be quoting Byron at my age:

“ ‘A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,

And all went merry as a marriage bell;—

But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell! . . .’ ”