Down-stairs, in the club's great room, she was surrounded for a moment
by the girls she had met in the afternoon, then she heard Sally's voice
repeating a cycle of names, and found herself bowing to a sextet of black
and white, terribly stiff, vaguely familiar figures. The name Blaine
figured somewhere, but at first she could not place him. A very confused,
very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bumpings followed, and every
one found himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabelle
manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with whom
she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A humorous
reference to the past was all she needed. The things Isabelle could
do socially with one idea were remarkable. First, she repeated it
rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a soupcon of Southern
accent; then she held it off at a distance and smiled at it--her
wonderful smile; then she delivered it in variations and played a sort of
mental catch with it, all this in the nominal form of dialogue. Froggy
was fascinated and quite unconscious that this was being done, not for
him, but for the green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully
watered hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory.
As an actress even in the fullest flush of her own conscious magnetism
gets a deep impression of most of the people in the front row, so
Isabelle sized up her antagonist. First, he had auburn hair, and from
her feeling of disappointment she knew that she had expected him to
be dark and of garter-advertisement slenderness. . . . For the rest,
a faint flush and a straight, romantic profile; the effect set off by a
close-fitting dress suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women
still delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to get tired
of.

During this inspection Amory was quietly watching.