The place was reekingly hot.
"Come on," said Joan, her blood stirred by the movement and sound.
Palgrave held her close and edged his way into the crowd between pointed bare elbows and tightly clasped hands.
"They call this dancing!" he said.
"What do you call it ?" "A bullfight in Hades." And he laughed and put his cheek against her hair and held her young slim body against his own.

What did he care what it was or where they were?
He had all the excuse that he needed to get the sense and scent of her.

His utter distaste of being bruised and bumped, and of adding himself to a heterogeneous collection of people with no more individuality than sheep, who followed each other from place to place in flocks after the manner of sheep, left him.

This girl was something more than a young, naive creature from the country, childishly keen to do everything and go everywhere at fever heat--something more than the very epitome of triumphant youth as clean and sweet as apple blossoms, with whom to flirt and pose as being the blase man of the world, the Mr.Know-All of civilization, a wild flower in a hot house.

Attracted at once by her exquisite coloring and delicious profile, and amused by her imperative manner and intolerant point of view, he had now begun to be piqued and intrigued by her insurgent way of treating marriage and of ignoring her husband--by her assumption of sexlessness and the fact that she was unmoved by his compliments and looked at him with eyes in which there was no remote suggestion of physical interest.
And it was this attitude, new to him hitherto on his easy way, that began to challenge him, to stir in him a desire to bring her down to his own level, to make her fall in love and become what he called human.