e wouldn't.
Other girls might brag about their education, their schools in Paris,
their better days and dead gentlemen fathers, but they were all ballet
girls, not one of the Mrs. Bigmouths could get away from that fact.
Ballet girls! They got a laugh in comic songs. Ballet girls and
mothers-in-law! They might gabble in a corner to each other and simper
and giggle and pretend, but they were ballet-hoppers. And what of it?
Why not? Wasn't a ballet girl as good as anybody else? Surely as good as
a stuck-up chorus girl, who couldn't dance and couldn't act and couldn't
even sing sometimes. They might be fine women with massive figures or
they might have sweetly pretty Chevy Chases and not mind what they did
after supper, but they weren't any better than ballet girls.

After all, Maurice did not look down on her. He did not patronize her.
He loved her. She loved him. With that thought flooding her imagination,
Jenny fell asleep and lay buried in her deep white pillow like a rosebud
in a snowdrift.

Chapter XVII: _Columbine Asleep_

Columbine lay sleeping on her heart. The long white hands were clasped
beneath those cheeks round which tumbled the golden curls. The coverlet,
thrown back in a restless dream, revealed her bent arms bare to the
elbow. The nightgown allowed a dim outline of her shoulder to appear
faintly, and where a pale blue bow had come untied, the dimple in her
throat was visible. The gay, deep eyes were closed beneath azure lids,
but the pencilled eyebrows still slanted mockingly, and round her red
lips was the curve of laughter. Awake, her complexion had the fragility
of rosy porcelain: in sleep the color fled, leaving it dead white as new
ivory.

Columbine lay sleeping, a miniature stolen from the world's collection.
The night wore on. The wind shook the old house. Dawn broke
tempestuously.

Now should Harlequin have hurried down the unreal street and, creeping
in magically, have kissed her a welcome to the sweet and careless
"twenties" that would contain the best of his Columbine's life.

Chapter XVIII: _Sweet and Twenty_

The studio, looking very cheerful for Jenny's birthday, had achieved a
Sabbath tidiness. It was, to be sure, a tidiness more apparent than
real, inasmuch as it consisted of pushing every disorderly object into a
corner and covering the accumulation with an old Spanish cope. Beneath
this semicircle of faded velvet lay onions and sealing-wax, palette,
brushes, bits