beautiful teeth and the supple gesture of a raised brown palm. That,
Linda decided, was the way she shook hands. Two dark-skinned men,
one in conventional evening dress, were with her; they had small
fine features and hair like carved ebony.

Linda had never before been at an affair with what she was forced to
call colored people; instinctively she was antagonistic and
superior. She turned to a solemn masculine presence with a ruffled
shirt and high black stock; he was talking in a resonant voice and
with dramatic gestures to a woman with a white face and low-drawn
hair. Linda was fascinated by the latter, dressed in a soft clinging
dull garnet. It wasn't her clothes, although they were remarkable,
that held her attention, but the woman's mouth. Apparently, it had
no corners. Like a little band of crimson rubber, or a ring of vivid
flame, it shifted and changed in the oddest shapes. It was an
unhappy mouth, and made her think of pain; but perhaps not so much
that as hunger ... not for food, Linda was certain. What did she
want?

There was a light appealing laugh from another seated on the floor
in a floating black dinner dress with lovely ankles in delicate
Spanish lace stockings; her head was thrown back for the whisper of
a heavy man with ashen hair, a heavenly scarf and half-emptied
glass.

Her bare shoulders, Linda saw, were as white as her own, as white
but more sloping. The other's hair, though, was the loveliest red
possible. The entire woman, relaxed and laughing in the perfumery
and swimming shadows, was irresistible. A man with a huge nose and
blank eyes, his hands disfigured with extraordinary rings, momentarily