arquetry for the gliding of her feet, and monstrous mirrors
for reflecting her face at unexpected angles. These distances fined her
grace still finer, and lent her a certain pathos, the charm of figures
vanishing and remote.

Not that you could think of Kitty Tailleur as in the least remote or
vanishing. She seemed to be always approaching, to hover imminently and
dangerously near.

Mr. Lucy looked fairly unapproachable. His niceness, Miss Keating
imagined, would keep him linked arm in arm with his sister, maintaining,
unconsciously, inoffensively, his distance and distinction. He would
manage better than the Colonel. He would not have to get up and go away.
So Miss Keating thought.

From the lounge behind the veranda, Kitty's voice came to her again.
Kitty was excited and her voice went winged. It flew upward, touched a
perilous height and shook there. It hung, on its delicate, feminine
wings, dominating the male voices that contended, brutally, below. Now
and then it found its lyric mate, a high, adolescent voice that followed
it with frenzy, that broke, pitifully, in sharp, abominable laughter,
like a cry of pain.

Miss Keating shut her eyes to keep out her vision of Kitty's face with
the look it wore when her voice went high.

She was roused by the waiter bringing coffee. Kitty Tailleur had come
out on to the veranda. She was pouring out Grace Keating's coffee, and
talking to her in another voice, the one that she kept for children and
for animals, and for all diminutive and helpless things. She was saying
that Miss Keating (whom she called Bunny) was a dear little white
rabbit, and she wanted to stroke her.

"You see, you are so very small," said Kitty, as she dropped sugar into
Miss Keating's cup. She had ordered cigarettes and a liqueur for
herself.

Miss Keating said nothing. She drank her coffee with a distasteful
movement of her lips.

Kitty Tailleur stretched herself at full length on a garden chair. She
watched her companion with eyes secretly, profoundly intent under
lowered lids.

"Do you mind my smoking?" she said presently.

"No," said Miss Keating.

"Do you mind my drinking Kuemmel?"

"No."

"Do you mind my showing seven inches of stocking?"

"No."

"What do you mind, then?"

"I mind your making yourself so very conspicuous."

"I don't make myself conspicuous. I was born so."

"You make me conspicuous. Goodness knows what all these people take us
for!"

"Holy Innocent! As lon