She had felt it building as she dressed in her room, as she walked quickly along the sidewalk to the corner rendezvous with her coat pulled snugly against the evening’s chill. If she was here, she might as well make the most of it. She might as well be what everyone expected her to be. The glitter of gold lamp-brackets and swirled marble floors went to her head like champagne—she made it go to her head, in the way she imagined champagne would. Wasn’t it funny that she had tasted gin but never champagne? Cruelly funny. She was talkative and laughed a good deal with her dance partners; she contradicted Kitty Lawrence flatly several times in a way that made Kitty look at her with lips pinched straight in displeasure. And when Sloop Jackson joined the group, she looked at him sidelong in a way which seemed to say that in spite of the episode in the hall last week, she wanted him to know she wasn’t a child and she was going to prove it on her own terms. She was playing with fire and she knew it—but almost her whole life was playing with fire now, so what difference did a few more sparks make?
