Why didn’t the men begin? What were they waiting for? There they stood, smoothing their gloves, patting their glossy hair and smiling among themselves. Then, quite suddenly, as if they had only just made up their minds that that was what they had to do, the men came gliding over the parquet. There was a joyful flutter among the girls.
Throughout the story, the narrator figures the men and women as birds participating in courtship/pre-mating dances. Observe the narrator's ornithological language here: the men "glid[e] over the parquet" towards the women, who respond with "a joyful flutter." With part-of-speech tagging, we could zoom in on how the story's syntactical elements (especially verbs and adjectives) create this parallel between social and animal rituals.