He shuddered every time he found himself on one leg; he got
sternly into everybody's way; he was the butt of the little noodle of
an instructor. All the social tortures he endured grimly, in the hope
that at last the cork would come out. Then, though there were all
kinds of girls in the class, merry, sentimental, practical,
coquettish, prudes, there was no kind, he felt, whose heart he could
not touch. In love-making, as in the favourite Thrums game of the
dambrod, there are sixty-one openings, and he knew them all. Yet at
the last dance, as at the first, the universal opinion of his partners
(shop-girls, mostly, from the large millinery establishments, who had
to fly like Cinderellas when the clock struck a certain hour) was that
he kept himself to himself, and they were too much the lady to make up
to a gentleman who so obviously did not want them.
Pym encouraged his friends to jeer at Tommy's want of interest in the
sex, thinking it a way of goading him to action. One evening, the
bottles circulating, they mentioned one Dolly, goddess at some bar, as
a fit instructress for him. Coarse pleasantries passed, but for a time
he writhed in silence, then burst upon them indignantly for their
unmanly smirching of a woman's character, and swept out, leaving them
a little ashamed.
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