s an ass. To be young, well-born, with
money enough, a brain instead of a mere intelligence, an essential
leader of men--Good God! Good God!" Then he subsided and blushed, jerked
up his shoulders and laughed. "Well--I never let myself go to any one
but you," he said. "And I won't inflict _you_ any longer."

IV

"I wish the old homes of England had electric lights," thought Miss
Otis, with a sigh.

There were four candles on the dressing-table, two on the mantel-shelf;
beyond the radius of their light the room was barely visible. She
carried one of the candles over to the cheval-glass and held it above
her head, close to her face, low on either side.

"I feel as if I had been put together by some unpleasant mechanical
process. It is well I am not inordinately vain, but when one puts on a
new dress for the first time--" She shrugged her shoulders hopelessly,
replaced the candle, and walked up and down the room swinging the
train--her first--of the charming gown of pale blue satin; patting the
hair coiled softly about the entire head in a line eminently becoming to
the profile, and prolonged by several little curls escaping to the neck.

She felt happy and excited, her fine almost severe face far more
girlishly alive than when she had told her story, provocatively dry, to
Flora Thangue. She directed an approving glance at the high heels of her
slippers, which, with her lofty carriage, produced the effect of
non-existing inches. She was barely five feet five, but she ranked with
tall women, her height as unchallenged as the chiselling of her profile.

"What frauds we all are!" she thought, with a humor of which she had
not vouchsafed Miss Thangue a hint. "But what is a cunningly made
slipper on a foot not so small, at the end of a body not quite long
enough, but an encouraging example of the triumph of art over nature?
Not the superiority, perhaps, but they are the best of working
partners."

She sat down and recalled the conversation with her new friend, giving
an amused little shudder. She had heard much of, and in her travels come
into contact with, the cold-blooded frankness of the English elect; with
whom it was either an instinct or a pose to manifest their careless
sense of impregnability. When pressed to give an account of herself the
dramatic possibilities of the method suddenly appealed to her,
accompanied by a mischievous desire to outdo them at their own game and
observe the effect. She had found