or any hour of the day; her frocks all expressed in stuff and style and
color, and the bravery of their flying laces and ribbons, the audacity of
spirit with which she was herself chicqued together, as she said. This
one she had on now was something that brightened her dull complexion, and
brought out the best effect of her eyes and mouth, and seemed the
effluence of her personal dash and grace. It made the most of her, and
she liked it beyond all her other negligees for its complaisance.

She got a book, and sat down in a long, low chair before the fire and
crossed her pretty slippers on the warm hearth. It was a quarter after
three by the clock on the mantel; but she had never felt more eagerly
awake. The party had not been altogether to her mind, up to midnight, but
after that it had been a series of rapid and vivid emotions, which
continued themselves still in the tumult of her nerves, and seemed to
demand an indefinite sequence of experience. She did not know what state
her brother might be in when he came home; she had not seen anything of
him after she first went out to supper; till then, though, he had kept
himself straight, as he needs must; but she could not tell what happened
to him afterward. She hoped that he would come home able to talk, for she
wished to talk. She wished to talk about herself; and as she had already
had flattery enough, she wanted some truth about herself; she wanted Alan
to say what he thought of her behavior the whole evening with that jay.
He must have seen something of it in the beginning, and she should tell
him all the rest. She should tell him just how often she had danced with
the man, and how many dances she had sat out with him; how she had
pretended once that she was engaged when another man asked her, and then
danced with the jay, to whom she pretended that he had engaged her for
the dance. She had wished to see how he would take it; for the same
reason she had given to some one else a dance that was really his. She
would tell Alan how the jay had asked her for that last dance, and then
never come near her again. That would give him the whole situation, and
she would know just what he thought of it.

What she thought of herself she hardly knew, or made believe she hardly
knew. She prided herself upon not being a flirt; she might not be very
good, as goodness went, but she was not despicable, and a flirt was
despicable. She did not call the audacity of her behavior with the jay