omantic charm. She greeted Mrs. Fazakerly with a
joyous lifting of the eyebrows, as much as to say, "What! another
delightful person?"

And she was observant in her way, too. When Miss Tancred put a hand
on her shoulder and said, "It will be horribly dull for you,
Georgie; you'll have nothing to do but talk to Mr. Durant," she
replied, "H'm! Mr. Durant looks as if he had been talked to all his
life. I shall talk to you, Frida."

All through dinner she managed to preserve her spirits, her air of
being among the most curious and interesting people. Durant wondered
how on earth she kept it up. She seemed one of those fortunate
beings whose vivacity is so overpowering that it can subdue even
dulness to itself. She made the Colonel look strangely old; beside
her Mrs. Fazakerly seemed suddenly to become dull and second-rate,
to sink into the position of an attendant, a fatuous chorus, a giddy
satellite. Her laughter swallowed up Mrs. Fazakerly's as a river in
flood devours its tributaries; her spirits quenched Mrs. Fazakerly's
as a blaze licks up a spasmodic flicker. It pleased Durant to look
at her, the abandonment of her manners was in such flagrant
contradiction with the Roman regularity of her Tancred face. Owing,
perhaps, to some dash of the Tancred blood in her, she was neither
pretty nor witty; yet she contrived to get her own way with
everybody. Durant accounted for it by her sheer youth, the obstinacy
of her will to live.

In twenty-four hours she had put a stop to Frida's disappearances,
to Durant's sketching, and to the Colonel's intellectual
conversation; and this she did by behaving so as to make these
things impossible. In short, she had taken possession of her cousin
and her black mare, of the Colonel and his cigarettes, of Mrs.
Fazakerly and her books, of everybody and everything except Durant.
She was friendly with him, but somehow her friendliness was
infinitely more unflattering than Miss Tancred's former apathy. It
implied that he was all very well in his way, but that she had seen
too many of his sort to be greatly excited about him; while in Frida
Tancred, now, she had found something absolutely and uniquely new.
She was not going to be put off with Durant; she fastened herself
upon Frida, and refused to let her go; she did the thing she had
said she would do--without absolutely ignoring her fellow-guest, she
talked to Frida or at Frida or for Frida alone. And yet, strangely
enough, by dint of much