The poems came afterward, when the dinner party filed into the dining room. Each of the seven young ladies had written a poem about each of the seven young men, and their verses were folded up and put beside the soup plates instead of place cards. That made the tedious business of finding your seat something of a game (the adults were exempted from the nonsense). The poem about Nathaniel involved a play on words, something about Natty looking natty. He recognized Constance’s handwriting, and while a small part of him was pleased that she had chosen him as the subject of her composition, the greater part was annoyed and irritated. He wished that instead of combed and scrubbed and looking natty in his Andover jacket, he had shown up exactly as he had come off Isaiah Kent’s sloop—in his soiled jersey, cologned in sweat and the reek of the bait bucket. The smell of someone who had done a man’s work, and compared to that work, all the chatter and the poems seemed trivial. He was, besides, disappointed in Constance; he liked to think of her as too serious and intelligent to idle away an entire afternoon writing doggerel while people like Isaiah and Toby sweated their hearts out to put bread on the table.

Such was his judgment before the meal began; now it was softened by the way she looked in the manteled glow of the gas-jet chandelier. She had short eyelashes, which gave her an expression of a perpetual, mild astonishment, as though she found every moment of life a surprise; her mouth was ever so slightly downturned, which moderated that look of wonder with a hint of melancholy; and her throat in its pearl choker and her lovely head poised under the graceful sweep of her Gibson girl pompadour all but shattered his heart. At first, he had been disappointed not to have been seated next to her; now he decided to be flattered: Gertrude Williams was keeping him away from her daughter because she knew that he was the most dangerous of all the young men there, was the one most likely to turn Constance’s head.