and the dining-room floor was smooth as wax could make it.

For some reason unknown to himself, Chip was "in the deeps." He even
threatened to stop in the bunk house and said he didn't feel like
dancing, but was brought into line by weight of numbers. He hated
Dick Brown, anyway, for his cute, little yellow mustache that curled
up at the ends like the tail of a drake. He had snubbed him all the
way out from town and handled Dick's guitar with a recklessness that
invited disaster. And the way Dick smirked when the Old Man introduced
him to the Little Doctor--a girl with a fellow in the East oughtn't to
let her eyes smile that way at a pin-headed little dude like Dick Brown,
anyway. And he--Chip--had given, her a letter postmarked blatantly:
"Gilroy, Ohio, 10:30 P. M."--and she had been so taken up with those
cussed musicians that she couldn't even thank him, and only just glanced
at the letter before she stuck it inside her belt. Probably she wouldn't
even read it till after the dance. He wondered if Dr. Cecil Granthum
cared--oh, hell! Of COURSE he cared--that is, if he had any sense at all.
But the Little Doctor--she wasn't above flirting, he noticed. If HE ever
fell in love with a girl--which the Lord forbid--he'd take mighty good
care she didn't get time to make dimples and smiles for some other
fellow to go to heaven looking at.

There, that was her, laughing like she always laughed--it reminded him of
pines nodding in a canyon and looking wise and whispering things they'd
seen and heard before you were born, and of water falling over rocks,
somehow. Queer, maybe--but it did. He wondered if Dick Brown had been
trying to say something funny. He didn't see, for the life of him, how
the Little Doctor could laugh at that little imitation man. Girls are--
well, they're easy pleased, most of them.