superb confidence in herself, to ask
these beautiful girls who she had heard wanted to marry him themselves.
Well, he understood women well enough to be indulgent to their little
vanities.

He was almost the last of the guests, but he had time to observe the
two girls before dinner was announced, in spite of the fact that he was
claimed by other acquaintances before he could reach them.

Anne looked regally handsome in gold-colored tissue and paillettes that
gave a tawny light to her eyes and hair, and to her skin an amber glow.
She held her head very high, and in spite of her mere five feet five,
looked little less stately than Madame Zattiany, who wore a marvellous
velvet gown the exact shade of her hair. Marian Lawrence was small but
so perfectly made that her figure was always alluded to as her body,
and she carried her head, not regally, but with an insolent assurance
that became her. She was very beautiful, with a gleaming white skin
that she never powdered nor colored, and hair like gold leaf, parted
and worn in smooth bands over her ears and knotted loosely on her neck
in the fashion known as a la vierge. Her large grayish-green eyes were
set far apart and her brows and lashes were black. She had a straight
innocent-looking nose with very thin nostrils, into which she was
capable of compressing the entire expression of a face. She generally
wore the fashionable colors of the moment, but tonight her soft
shimmering gown was of palest green, and Clavering wondered if this
were a secret declaration of war. She, too, was of the siren class,
and it was possible that she and Mary Zattiany derived from some common
ancestress who had combed her hair on a rock or floated northward over
the steppes of Russia. But there were abysmal differences between the
two women, as Clavering well knew. Marian Lawrence, with great natural
intelligence, never read anything more serious than a novel and
preferred those that were not translated into English. She took no
interest whatever in anything outside her inherited circumference, and
had prided herself during the war upon ignoring its existence. She was
as luxurious and as dainty as a cat and one of the most ardent
sportswomen in America. She looked as if she had just stepped out of a
stained-glass window, and she was a hard, subtle, predatory flirt; too
much in love with her beautiful body to give it wholly to any man. She
had never really fallen in love with Clavering