es, moist and
bright, fixed upon a wide doorway where the dancers fluctuated. She was
disquieted by more than Mildred's reserve, though reserve so marked had
certainly the significance of a warning that Alice's definition, "my
most intimate friend," lacked sanction. Indirect notice to this effect
could not well have been more emphatic, but the sting of it was left
for a later moment. Something else preoccupied Alice: she had just
been surprised by an odd experience. At first sight of this Mr. Arthur
Russell, she had said to herself instantly, in words as definite as if
she spoke them aloud, though they seemed more like words spoken to her
by some unknown person within her: "There! That's exactly the kind of
looking man I'd like to marry!"

In the eyes of the restless and the longing, Providence often appears to
be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard
whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some
among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be petted
with blessing upon blessing.

In Alice's eyes, Mildred had been blessed enough; something ought to
be left over, by this time, for another girl. The final touch to the
heaping perfection of Christmas-in-everything for Mildred was that this
Mr. Arthur Russell, good-looking, kind-looking, graceful, the perfect
fiance, should be also "VERY well off." Of course! These rich always
married one another. And while the Mildreds danced with their Arthur
Russells the best an outsider could do for herself was to sit with Frank
Dowling--the one last course left her that was better than dancing with
him.

"Well, what DO you want to talk about?" he inquired.

"Nothing," she said. "Suppose we just sit, Frank." But a moment later
she remembered something, and, with a sudden animation, began to
prattle. She pointed to the musicians down the corridor. "Oh, look at
them! Look at the leader! Aren't they FUNNY? Someone told me they're
called 'Jazz Louie and his half-breed bunch.' Isn't that just crazy?
Don't you love it? Do watch them, Frank."

She continued to chatter, and, while thus keeping his glance away from
herself, she detached the forlorn bouquet of dead violets from her dress
and laid it gently beside the one she had carried.

The latter already reposed in the obscurity selected for it at the base
of one of the box-trees.

Then she was abruptly silent.

"You certainly are a funny girl," Dowling remarked. "Yo