ed the previous winter, and hardly a man been got to
them. Now the men would have begged for invitations. They even began to
attend church; and Helena's "evening" was so crowded that she was
obliged to ask five or six of her girl friends to help her. Alan Rush,
Eugene Fort, Carter Howard, a Southerner of charming manners, infinite
tact, and little conversation, and "Dolly" Webster, a fledgeling of
enormous length and well-proportioned brain, were her shadows, her
serfs, her determined, trembling adorers. They barely hated one another,
so devoured were they by the sovereign passion; and as they were treated
with exasperating similitude, there was nothing to set them at one
another's throats.

Helena had all the gifts and arts of the supreme coquette. She allured
and mocked, appealed and commanded; adapted herself with the suppleness
of bronze to mould, with enchanting flashes of egotism; discarded all
perception of man's existence in the abstract, when she had surrendered
her attention to one, to jerk him out of his heaven by ordering him to
go and send her his rival; possessed a quickness of intuition which
finished a man's sentences with her eyes, an exquisite sympathy which
made a man feel that here at last he was understood (as he would wish
himself understood, rather than as he understood himself); an audacity
which never failed to surprise, and never shocked; a fund of talk which
never wore itself into platitudes, and a willing ear; and an absolute
confidence in herself and her destiny. In addition she had great beauty,
the high light spirits of her mercurial temperament, a charming and
equable manner (when not engaged in judiciously tormenting her slaves),
and a shrewd brain. What wonder that her sovereignty was something for
the men who worshipped her to remember when they too were old beaux, and
that their present condition was abject? The wonder was that the women
did not hate her; but so impulsive and unaffected a creature disarms her
own sex, particularly when her gowns are faultless, and she is not
lifeless in their company, to scintillate the moment a man enters the
room.

And they forbore to criticise the dictates of her royal fancy. It is
true that she deferred to no one's opinion, but she escaped criticism
nevertheless. If she capriciously refused to dance at a party, but sat
the night through with one man, not recognising the existence of her
lowering train, people merely smiled and shrugged their shou