d looks were altogether manly, yet
approached actual beauty as closely as a boy's good looks should dare;
and dance-music and flowers have some effect upon nineteen-year-old
girls as well as upon eighteen-year-old boys. Miss Morgan turned
her eyes slowly from George, and pressed her face among the
lilies-of-the-valley and violets of the pretty bouquet she carried,
while, from the gallery above, the music of the next dance carolled out
merrily in a new two-step. The musicians made the melody gay for the
Christmastime with chimes of sleighbells, and the entrance to the
shadowed stairway framed the passing flushed and lively dancers, but
neither George nor Miss Morgan suggested moving to join the dance.

The stairway was draughty: the steps were narrow and uncomfortable; no
older person would have remained in such a place. Moreover, these two
young people were strangers to each other; neither had said anything in
which the other had discovered the slightest intrinsic interest; there
had not arisen between them the beginnings of congeniality, or even of
friendliness--but stairways near ballrooms have more to answer for than
have moonlit lakes and mountain sunsets. Some day the laws of glamour
must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would
be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an
apple, but by a young lady.

Age, confused by its own long accumulation of follies, is everlastingly
inquiring, "What does she see in him?" as if young love came about
through thinking--or through conduct. Age wants to know: "What on earth
can they talk about?" as if talking had anything to do with April rains!
At seventy, one gets up in the morning, finds the air sweet under a
bright sun, feels lively; thinks, "I am hearty, today," and plans to go
for a drive. At eighteen, one goes to a dance, sits with a stranger on
a stairway, feels peculiar, thinks nothing, and becomes incapable of any
plan whatever. Miss Morgan and George stayed where they were.

They had agreed to this in silence and without knowing it; certainly
without exchanging glances of intelligence--they had exchanged no
glances at all. Both sat staring vaguely out into the ballroom, and, for
a time, they did not speak. Over their heads the music reached a
climax of vivacity: drums, cymbals, triangle, and sleighbells, beating,
clashing, tinkling. Here and there were to be seen couples so carried
away that, ceasing to move at the deco