ht and beautiful and winning, but--she was engaged to Jack
Holt. She showed slight consciousness of any restraint on her perfect
freedom, however, and gave away Jack's roses, purchased that day at a high
figure, before his eyes. Once or twice, when she passed us, she smiled and
nodded in the gayest good spirits; and at last, when she was tired of
dancing and wanted an ice, she beckoned to Jack, put her hand inside his
arm and led him into the conservatory.

"How well she does it!" said Harry Dart, coming up to me. "Quite the
brilliant belle! By Jove! how she dances! I despise the girl with her
greedy maw, and deuced airs of high gentility when she is a perfect
beggar, but it is a second heaven to dance with her. She has the _go_ of a
wild animal in her. She is a little like a panther--so round, so sleek, so
agile in her spring. I told her just now I should like to paint
her--yellow eyes, hair like an aureole, supple form and satin coat--lying
on a panther-skin."

"Her eyes are not yellow."

"By Jove! they are. When she's dancing her whole face changes: she looks
dangerous."

"I don't like your tone when you speak of her, Harry."

"Oh! don't you? One of these days both you and Jack will be wiser where
that girl is concerned."

But Jack came back to us presently, quite contented to look at her
successes and not to speak to her again that evening. At supper-time we
watched her from a distance, and a more brilliant young coquette than Miss
Georgy showed herself to be I have never seen. She looked more and more
beautiful as the night wore on, the flush deepening in her cheeks, her
eyes dilating, her hair loosening. Men full fledged though we considered
ourselves now in our senior year, we felt like boys before her. Every man
in the room seemed proud of her slightest mark of attention. Tall dandies
with ineffable composure and a consummate air of worldly knowledge;
tranquil, dreamy-eyed literary men; solid citizens with stiff white
side-whiskers and red faces,--all were in her train. Harry withdrew from
her at last, becoming, as I was, quite oppressed with a sense of his youth
and worthlessness.

Thorpe good-naturedly came up to us as we three stood leaning against the
wall, tired and depressed, yet feeling no wish to get away until everybody
else had gone, and asked us how we liked it, if we had been introduced,
and all that. It came out then that Jack and I had not once thought of any
woman in the rooms except Georg