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embrace everyone, say something heartfelt, grateful tothem all, I feel so light, so elated, so blissfully young. I whirl from partner to partner, I talk and laugh and dance, and never notice the time, carried away by the torrent of my pleasure.
    Then I suddenly look up and happen to see the time. It is ten-thirty—and I realise, to my alarm, that I have been dancing and talking and amusing myself for almost an hour but, great oaf that I am, I haven’t yet asked my host’s daughter to dance. I have only danced with my two neighbours at dinner and two or three other ladies, the ones I liked best, entirely neglecting the daughter of the house! What uncivil behaviour, what a slight to her! I must put that right at once!
    I am shocked, however, to realise that I cannot remember exactly what the girl looks like. I bowed to her only briefly when she was already seated at table, all I recollect is the impression of fragile delicacy that she made on me, and then the quick, curious glance of her grey eyes. But where is she? She is the daughter of the house, surely she can’t have left the party? I look uneasily at all the girls and women sitting by the wall; I see no one like her. Finally I step into the third room where, hidden behind a Japanese screen, the quartet is playing, and breathe a sigh of relief. For there she is—yes, I am sure of it—delicate, slender, sitting in her pale-blue dress between two old ladies in the corner of this boudoir, at a malachite-green table with a shallow bowl of flowers on it. Her head is slightly bowed, as if she were entirely absorbed in the music, and the deep crimson of the roses in the bowl makes me notice the translucent pallor of her forehead under her heavy light-red hair. But I have no time for idle gazing. Thank God, I think fervently, now I’ve tracked her down, and I can make up for being so remiss.
    I go over to the table—the music is playing merrily away—and bow to indicate that I am asking her to dance. She looksat me in startled surprise, her lips still half open, interrupted in the middle of what she was saying. But she makes no move to rise and go with me. Didn’t she understand? I bow again, and my spurs clink softly. “May I have the pleasure of this dance, dear young lady?”
    Something terrible happens next. She had been leaning slightly forward, but now she flinches abruptly back as if avoiding a blow. At the same time the blood rushes into her pale cheeks, the lips that were half open just now are pressed hard together, and only her eyes keep staring at me with an expression of horror such as I have never seen in my life before. Next moment a paroxysm passes right through her convulsed body. She braces herself on the table with both hands, making the bowl of roses clink and jangle, and at the same time something hard, made of wood or metal, falls from her chair to the ground. Both her hands are still clutching the table, which sways, her childlike body is shaken again and again, but all the same she does not run away, she only clings even more desperately to the heavy tabletop. And again and again that shaking, those tremors run from her cramped fists all the way up to her hairline. Suddenly she bursts into sobs, a wild, elemental sound like a stifled scream.
    But the two old ladies are already with her, to right and left, one on each side, holding her, caressing her, speaking soothing, reassuring words to the trembling girl. Her convulsed hands relax, drop gently from the table, and she falls back into her chair. However, the weeping goes on, even worse than before, like a rush of blood, like a surge of hot vomit rising in her throat it keeps bursting forth. If the music drowning the sound of it out from behind the screen were to stop for a moment, even the dancers in the next room would hear her sobbing.
    I stand there, horrified, bewildered. What exactly has happened? Baffled, I stare at the two old ladies as they try to calm the sobbing girl. Now, as she begins