larating ends of
existence.

The ball went merrily. Belinda had the success that might easily have
been predicted. In contrast with her, the other young girls seemed like
pale-hued flowers on some tapestry at whose centre glows a rich blossom
worked in gold. She danced and danced without getting dishevelled or
red, or pale. She looked the embodied Joy of Living, as she swayed
tirelessly, a faint, secret smile just parting her lips, her head thrown
slightly back. And the young men with whom she danced seemed also washed
out and inadequate beside her--very insufficient twigs to support the
radiant, full-blown blossom of her beauty.

But as the evening wore on, though she still smiled, a little flame of
anger and disappointment began to burn her heart. Morry was evidently
hard-set against her. Not once had he asked her to dance. It was very
shabby of him. It was cowardly. She knew very well that he was afraid of
her. She loved his fear of her, but she hated this dull, "proper," tame
resistance that wouldn't dare even one dance with her. Then suddenly her
spirits leaped. There would be the Cotillion. He would _have_ to dance
with her some time during the Cotillion! Her opportunity came with the
"Mirror figure." She sat on a little gilded chair in the middle of the
ballroom, one gold-shot foot thrust out. She was more than ever like
Lorelei, as she sat there with the little silver mirror in her hand,
coolly touching her tossed hair into place, while she waited for the
swains to kneel foolishly before her.

Sophy, who had not danced this evening, stood near a doorway watching
her. To her, the girl in her apricot draperies, looking at herself in
the silver glass with such perfect _disinvolture_, seemed suddenly like
a beautiful Falsehood who had stolen Truth's mirror and was trying to
see what it revealed. For somehow, as she had watched her during the
evening, the intuitive conviction had come to her that Belinda was very
false. And yet Belinda was perfectly true--to herself. What to Sophy
would have seemed falseness, would have seemed to Belinda "being true to
herself." She really thought it "being true to herself" to take Morris
for herself, if she could, by any means within the limits of
conventional propriety and at any cost to any one--but herself and,
within reason, him.

Young men by the score came and knelt at the golden shoes of Belinda.
She sent them all away, with the most charming effrontery. Then Sophy
saw L