pon one endowed with signal
beauty, than they think of wanting great diamonds or thousand-dollar
horses. No man or woman can appropriate beauty without paying for
it,--in endowments, in fortune, in position, in self-surrender, or other
valuable stock; and there are a great many who are too poor, too
ordinary, too humble, too busy, too proud, to pay any of these prices for
it. So the unbeautiful get many more lovers than the beauties; only, as
there are more of them, their lovers are spread thinner and do not make
so much show.

The young master stood looking at Helen Darley with a kind of tender
admiration. She was such a picture of the martyr by the slow social
combustive process, that it almost seemed to him he could see a pale
lambent nimbus round her head.

"I did not see you at the great party last evening," he said, presently.

She looked up and answered, "No. I have not much taste for such large
companies. Besides, I do not feel as if my time belonged to me after it
has been paid for. There is always something to do, some lesson or
exercise,--and it so happened, I was very busy last night with the new
problems in geometry. I hope you had a good time."

"Very. Two or three of our girls were there. Rosa Milburn. What a
beauty she is! I wonder what she feeds on! Wine and musk and chloroform
and coals of fire, I believe; I didn't think there was such color and
flavor in a woman outside the tropics."

Miss Darley smiled rather faintly; the imagery was not just to her taste:
femineity often finds it very hard to accept the fact of muliebrity.

"Was"--?

She stopped short; but her question had asked itself.

"Elsie there? She was, for an hour or so. She looked frightfully
handsome. I meant to have spoken to her, but she slipped away before I
knew it."

"I thought she meant to go to the party," said Miss Darley. "Did she
look at you?"

"She did. Why?"

"And you did not speak to her?"

"No. I should have spoken to her, but she was gone when I looked for
her. A strange creature! Is n't there an odd sort of fascination about
her? You have not explained all the mystery about the girl. What does
she come to this school for? She seems to do pretty much as she likes
about studying."

Miss Darley answered in very low tones. "It was a fancy of hers to come,
and they let her have her way. I don't know what there is about her,
except that she seems to take my life out of me when she looks at