poke like a schoolboy. He had
been wandering about for more than an hour before Louise discovered him.
She at once left her place and crossed the room to where he was standing
by the wall.

"Cheer up!" she begged, with a delightful smile. "I am afraid that you
are being bored to death. Will you not come and be presented to our
guests?"

"For goodness' sake, no!" John implored. "I have never seen one of them
act, and my French is appalling. I am all right, dear. It's quite enough
pleasure to see you looking so beautiful, and to think that I am going
to be allowed to drive you home afterward."

Louise looked into a neighboring mirror, and gazed critically at her own
reflected image. The lines of her figure, fine and subtle, seemed
traced by the finger of some great sculptor underneath her faultlessly
made white-satin gown. She studied her white neck and shoulders and her
perfectly shaped head, seeking everywhere for some detail with which an
impartial critic might find fault.

She had a curious feeling that at that precise moment she had reached
the zenith of her power and her charm. Her audience at the theater had
been wonderfully sympathetic, had responded with rare appreciation to
every turn of her voice, to every movement and gesture. The compliments,
too, which she had been receiving from the crowds who had bent over her
fingers that night had been no idle words. Many distinguished men had
looked at her with a light in their eyes which women understand so
well--a light questioning yet respectful, which provokes yet begs for
something in the way of response.

She was conscious, acutely conscious, of the atmosphere she had created
around her. She was glorying in the subtle outward signs of it. She was
in love with herself; in love, too, with this delightful new feeling of
loving. It would have given her more joy than anything else in the
world, in that moment of her triumph, to have passed her arm through
John's, to have led him up to them all, and to have said:

"After all, you see, I am a very simple sort of woman. I have done just
the sort of simple thing that other women do, and I am glad of it--very
glad and very happy!"

Her lips moved to the music of her thoughts. John leaned toward her.

"Did you say anything?" he asked.

"You dear stupid, of course I did not! Or if I did, it was just one of
those little whispers to oneself which mean nothing, yet which count for
so much. Can I not do anything to mak