had not married, perhaps because there was always
a crowd of men around her. She was not fast (though some
might have called her vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths
an impression of being at once popular and inaccessible.
A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra,
or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage door.
Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt;
she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades;
and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm,
she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her.
To the crashing orchestration of the air the clouds rose
like the curtain of some long-expected pantomime.

Nor, oddly, was the girl in blue entirely unimpressed by this
apocalypse in a private garden; though she was one of most prosaic
and practical creatures alive. She was, indeed, no other than
the strenuous niece whose strength alone upheld that mansion of decay.
But as the gale swung and swelled the blue and white skirts till they
took on the monstrous contours of Victorian crinolines, a sunken memory
stirred in her that was almost romance--a memory of a dusty volume
of _Punch_ in an aunt's house in infancy: pictures of crinoline hoops
and croquet hoops and some pretty story, of which perhaps they were a part.
This half-perceptible fragrance in her thoughts faded almost instantly,
and Diana Duke entered the house even more promptly than her companion.
Tall, slim, aquiline, and dark, she seemed made for such swiftness.
In body she was of the breed of those birds and beasts that are at once
long and alert, like greyhounds or herons or even like an innocent snake.
The whole house revolved on her as on a rod of steel. It would
be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so
impatient that she obeyed herself before any one else obeyed her.
Before electricians could mend a bell or locksmiths open a door,
before dentists could pluck a tooth or butlers draw a tight cork,
it was done already with the silent violence of her slim hands.
She was light; but there was nothing leaping about her lightness.
She spurned the ground, and she meant to spurn it. People talk
of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible
thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.

"It's enough to blow your head off," said the young woman in white,
going to the looking-glass.

The young woman in blue mad