With the passage of the months, Eleanor, little by little, entered upon a strange new life in accordance with what had been promised her. Through the London social season she went about with Lady Fiske and was admired and sought after everywhere. It was as though a magician had touched her face, and there had passed away from it all sense of trouble, all evil memories, every trace of suffering. The troubled mouth seemed ever ready to break into laughter, the faint lines and wrinkles had faded completely away. She was years younger. The light of past sorrows had gone from her eyes, they remained only the mirror of the brightest and gayest things in life. In her youth, her beauty, and her almost assertive joie de vivre she seemed like a child among the little company by whom she was constantly surrounded wherever she went in her soulless, indefatigable quest for amusement.
"Are you not afraid, Eleanor, that some day you will grow tired of amusing yourself?" Powers asked her one night at a dinner where she had outshone all others.
A peal of light, sweet laughter rang out above the babel of conversation. Everyone looked toward Eleanor's table. She was leaning a little forward in her chair, her lips parted, her cheeks flushed, her eyes alight with enjoyment. A single row of pearls encircled her long, graceful neck, her shoulders and bare arms were dazzlingly soft, her hair gleamed in the shaded lamplight.
"No! Why on earth should I? What else is there to do?"
"What about amusing other people sometimes—by way of change?"
She smiled delightfully.
"How dull! I suppose you mean have a night class for boys, or get up concerts to send ragged children to the seaside."
"Why not? Such things are kindly enough; they do good! They are excellent things for a girl to interest herself in."
"But it wouldn't amuse me at all, Powers! I should be bored to death."