Before dancing with Jim, Rose had believed that she was having a lovely time at the party. All of her father’s old friends had come one by one to ask her for a dance, and one time there were two men competing for her hand — Mr. Cleary, who was fat and nearly bald, and Mr. Fagan, who was thin and always smiling — and they asked her to choose between them, and she could not, and they all stood there laughing and she felt very much at home. Mrs. Cleary came up to them and took Rose’s hand and asked her how had she learned to be such a good dancer, and she told them about the way her father used to always dance her around and make her keep time, and Mr. Cleary said, “Your father was a great dancer. I can see him now.” And Mr. Fagan said, “When he danced, he was enjoying himself. You could see that.” Then Mrs. Cleary squeezed Rose’s hand and said she was a good girl and that it was a pity her mother hadn’t come tonight, to see how popular she was.

But when Jim asked her to dance — from the moment when he appeared before her to her astonishment — she remained in astonishment. The brilliance of that moment when she had first looked into his face and said she was free remained around them, and made them both free from the rest of the people in the room so that she understood at once that it was not the velvet curtains or the masks that had made the room familiar to her but the impression that remained on it of her father’s hand. Somehow, however he had done it, her father had managed to make the room ready for this moment when she and Jim would dance together. Her father had loved her. This room could never have been his. And as it was now, he had only dreamed it. He had never seen it at all, but he had known how it was going to be.