oward the back of the room, swinging on herself, stepping a few paces
toward the front of the room, swinging on herself again, and all the
while flinging at Letty glances which said: "If you want to see scorn,
this is it."

Fascination kept Letty paralyzed. Steptoe grew uneasy.

"I wish the French madam'd come back agyne," he murmured, from half
closed lips. "We 'aven't come 'ere to be myde a spectacle of--not for
no one."

And just then the seal-brown figure strolled away, as serenely and
impudently as she had come.

"Well, of all----!"

Letty's exclamation was stifled by the fact that as the first young
lady of distinction passed out a second crossed her coming in. They
took no notice of each other, though the newcomer walked straight up
to Letty, not to stare but to toss up her chin with a hint of laughter
suppressed. Laughter, suppressed or unsuppressed, was her note. She
was all fair-haired, blue-eyed vivacity. It was a relief to Letty that
she didn't stare. She twitched, she twisted, she pirouetted, striking
dull gleams from an embroidery studded with turquoise and jade--but
she hadn't the hard unconscious arrogance of the other one.

All the same it pained Letty that great ladies should be so beautiful.
Not that this one was beautiful of face--she wasn't--only
piquant--but the general effect was beautiful. It showed what money
and the dressmaker could do. If she, Letty could have had a dress and
a hat like this!--a blue or a green, it was difficult to say
which--with these strips of jade and turquoise on a ground of the
purplish-greenish-blue she remembered as that of the monkshood in the
old farm garden in Canada--and the darlingest hat, with one long
feather beginning as green and graduating through every impossible
shade of green and blue till it ended in a monkshood tip....

No wonder the girl's blue eyes danced and quizzed and laughed. As a
matter of fact, Letty commented, the eyes brought a little too much
blue into the composition. It was her only criticism. As a whole it
lacked contrast. If she herself had worn this costume--with her
gold-stone eyes--and brown hair--and rich coloring, when she had any
color--blue was always a favorite shade with her--when she could
choose, which wasn't often--she remembered as a child on the farm how
she used to plaster herself with the flowers of the blue succory--the
dust-flower they called it down there because it seemed to thrive like
the disinherited on the