more graceful, and the men rivalled the women in their
supple glidings and bendings, doublings and swayings. Concha danced
with Ignacio Sal, Rafaella with William Sturgis; their pliant grace, as
facile as grain rippling before the wind, would have put the best
ballet in Europe to the blush. Concha's skirts swept Rezanov's feet,
her little slippers twinkled before his admiring eyes, and he lost no
sinuous turn or undulation of her beautiful figure; but she never
vouchsafed him a glance.

When the dance finished his host introduced him to the prettiest of the
girls and he paid them as many compliments as their heads would stand.
He even took some trouble to talk to them, if only to fathom the
sources of their unlikeness to Concha Arguello. He concluded that the
gulf that separated her from these charming, vivacious, shallow young
girls was not dug by education alone. Individualities were rare enough
in Europe; out here, in earthly, but sparsely settled paradises, they
must be rarer still; but that one had wandered into the lovely shell of
Concha Arguello he no longer doubted. The fact that it had developed
haphazardly, with little or no help from her sentience, and was still
fluid and uncertain, but multiplied her in interest and charm. The
women to whom he was accustomed knew themselves, consequently were no
riddle to a man of his experience, but here he had an odd sense of
having entered into a compact in the dark with a girl who might one day
symbolize some high and impassioned ideal he had cherished in the days
before ideals had been cast aside with the negative virtues that bred
them.

As he coolly studied the good looks of the young caballeros and the
plain intellectual face and slight little figure of the Bostonian,
noted the utter indifference with which they were treated by the
Favorita of Presidio and Mission, he felt a sudden rush of arrogance, a
youthful tingling of nerves, the same prophetic sense of imminent
happiness and power that his first contact with the light electrical
air and the beauty of the country had induced. After all, he was but
forty-two. Life on the whole had been very kind to him. And, although
he did not realize it as yet, his frame, blighted by the rigors of the
past three years, was already sensible to a renewal of juice and sap.
He admitted that he was more interested than he had been for many
years, and that if he was not in love, he tingled with a very natural
masculine desir