By nine o'clock Alice is ready, and at home she looks lovely. Her mother has relined the white organdie, and two bouquets of her own violets, their stems wrapped in tin-foil and purple chiffon, sit at her waist and in her hand. Miss Perry calls her purely and simply a vision. Her father asks who her beau is, and she tells him she means to have a good time, then says it again with sharp determination. Her mother slips her father's old raincoat over her wrap, and in the car Alice learns why. Walter has rented a second-hand tin Lizzie for seventy-five cents from the Lambs' chauffeur, the family whose ladies laughed at her cane, and he tells her so with some enjoyment.
At the Palmers' gate she panics and makes him leave the car in the street. A man grins at them from a passing foreign coupé, and she is sure it is Harvey Malone. She hurries past the man in livery, laughing, 'Our car broke down outside the gate.' In the receiving line she whispers to Mildred about the maize Georgette and her pearls, and Mildred, colouring slightly, passes Alice's hand straight on to Mrs. Palmer. Alice is fairly sure that Walter yawned in Mr. Palmer's face.
Walter turns out to be the best dancer in the room, and despises it. When the music stops nobody comes for Alice, so she becomes a lively belle by force. She chatters, waves her arms, brushes Walter's nose with her violets and cheers him like a theatre crowd, until he tells her he can't eat dead violets. Here, among the other girls, her dress is the only organdie in the room, and she remembers hearing that nobody wears organdie in the evening except in midsummer. Mildred passes carrying big florist's violets laced with lilies of the valley, their stems in cloth of gold. Alice's wildflowers droop in the heat, and she feels they tell everyone that she picked them herself.
Walter wants to go and smoke. The mothers in the corners are there as 'background' for their daughters; Alice's own parents were not invited, and she cannot bring herself to sit among the matrons. She walks Walter through the rooms as if they were on their way to join merry friends, until he warns her that after one more dance she is on her own. Across the room Mrs. Dowling argues furiously with her round son Frank, glaring at Alice. Walter goes. Frank arrives, red with annoyance, and asks for the dance. Alice, who swore at home that she would snub him, cries, 'Why, you nice Frank Dowling! How lovely!'
Coming Up in Chapter 7
Frank Dowling dances with more vigour than skill, collides with Alice's knees and steers through the crowd by main force, quite sure he is dancing. Then he leads her to a nook of box-trees, where they meet Mildred leaving on the arm of a tall stranger, and Alice sees her proud friend look up at him almost blushing.
