eighteen-hundred-and-one, about to dance at the Luxembourg. She
placed her hand upon the sleeve of Richard Lindley, and, glancing
intelligently over his shoulder into the eyes of Valentine
Corliss, glided rhythmically away.

People looked at her; they always did. Not only the non-dancers
watched her; eyes everywhere were upon her, even though the owners
gyrated, glided and dipped on distant orbits. The other girls
watched her, as a rule, with a profound, an almost passionate
curiosity; and they were prompt to speak well of her to men,
except in trustworthy intimacy, because they did not enjoy being
wrongfully thought jealous. Many of them kept somewhat aloof from
her; but none of them ever nowadays showed "superiority" in her
presence, or snubbed her: that had been tried and proved
disastrous in rebound. Cora never failed to pay her score--and
with a terrifying interest added, her native tendency being to
take two eyes for an eye and the whole jaw for a tooth. They let
her alone, though they asked and asked among themselves the
never-monotonous question: "Why do men fall in love with girls
like that?" a riddle which, solved, makes wives condescending to
their husbands.

Most of the people at this dance had known one another as friends,
or antagonists, or indifferent acquaintances, for years, and in
such an assembly there are always two worlds, that of the women
and that of the men. Each has its own vision, radically different
from that of the other; but the greatest difference is that the
men are unaware of the other world, only a few of them--usually
queer ones like Ray Vilas--vaguely perceiving that there are two
visions, while all the women understand both perfectly. The men
splash about on the surface; the women keep their eyes open under
water. Or, the life of the assembly is like a bright tapestry: the
men take it as a picture and are not troubled to know how it is
produced; but women are weavers. There was a Beauty of far-flung
renown at Mrs. Villard's to-night: Mary Kane, a creature so made
and coloured that young men at sight of her became as water and
older men were apt to wonder regretfully why all women could not
have been made like Mary. She was a kindly soul, and never
intentionally outshone her sisters; but the perfect sumptuousness
of her had sometimes tried the amiability of Cora Madison, to whom
such success without effort and without spark seemed unfair, as
well as bovine. Miss Kane was a centra