eyes!"

A girl may be pardoned who takes as a compliment the saying that her
eyes are fatal. The words warmed Gyp, uncontrollably light-hearted in
these days, just as she was warmed when people turned to stare at her.
The soft air, the mellowness of this gay place, much music, a sense of
being a rara avis among people who, by their heavier type, enhanced her
own, had produced in her a kind of intoxication, making her what the
baroness called "un peu folle." She was always breaking into laughter,
having that precious feeling of twisting the world round her thumb,
which does not come too often in the life of one who is sensitive.
Everything to her just then was either "funny" or "lovely." And the
baroness, conscious of the girl's chic, genuinely attracted by one so
pretty, took care that she saw all the people, perhaps more than all,
that were desirable.

To women and artists, between whom there is ever a certain kinship,
curiosity is a vivid emotion. Besides, the more a man has conquered, the
more precious field he is for a woman's conquest. To attract a man who
has attracted many, what is it but a proof that one's charm is superior
to that of all those others? The words of the baroness deepened in Gyp
the impression that Fiorsen was "impossible," but secretly fortified the
faint excitement she felt that he should have remembered her out of all
that audience. Later on, they bore more fruit than that. But first came
that queer incident of the flowers.

Coming in from a ride, a week after she had sat with Winton under the
Schiller statue, Gyp found on her dressing-table a bunch of Gloire de
Dijon and La France roses. Plunging her nose into them, she thought:
"How lovely! Who sent me these?" There was no card. All that the German
maid could say was that a boy had brought them from a flower shop "fur
Fraulein Vinton"; it was surmised that they came from the baroness. In
her bodice at dinner, and to the concert after, Gyp wore one La France
and one Gloire de Dijon--a daring mixture of pink and orange against
her oyster-coloured frock, which delighted her, who had a passion for
experiments in colour. They had bought no programme, all music being
the same to Winton, and Gyp not needing any. When she saw Fiorsen come
forward, her cheeks began to colour from sheer anticipation.

He played first a minuet by Mozart; then the Cesar Franck sonata; and
when he came back to make his bow, he was holding in his hand a Gloire
de Dijo