s of to-day are not all that they were
in the happy eighties--that one might make up flashily like Geraldine
St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha Underwood, and yet remain
in all essential social values "a lady"--still he was aware that the
external decorations of a chorus girl could not turn the shining
daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and, though the
nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever invented, one would
never dream of associating her with a circus ring. It was not the things
one did that made one appear unrefined, he had concluded at last, but
the way that one did them; and Patty Vetch's way was not the prescribed
way of his world. Small as she was there was too much of her. She
contrived always to be where one was looking. She was too loud, too
vivid, too highly charged with vitality; she was too obviously
different. If a redbird had flown into the heated glare of the ballroom
Stephen's gaze would have followed it with the same startled and
fascinated attention.

As the girl approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was
conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant
attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even pretty
according to the standards with which he was familiar, she possessed
what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. He had never imagined that
anything so small could be so much alive. The electric light under which
she passed revealed the few golden freckles over her childish nose, the
gray-green colour of her eyes beneath the black eyelashes, and the
sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet as a carnation. It
revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with French toes and high
and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless alike of danger and
of common sense, over the slippery ground. The son of a strong-minded
though purely feminine mother, he had been trained to esteem discretion
in dress almost as highly as rectitude of character in a woman; and by
no charitable stretch of the imagination could he endow his first
impression of Patty Vetch with either of these attributes.

"It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought
severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind
when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a
frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining
ground. When he sprang forward and bent over h