But it pleased her swiftly to change the subject. "I am quite excited this evening," she went on. "I am beginning a new career; you understand, of course. Tell me, Miss Dares, how do you think I shall succeed in it?"
Martha was watching her fixedly. And Martha's reply had a short, odd sound. "I think you are almost clever enough not to fail," she said.
VII.
Before Pauline had been an hour longer in the Dares's drawing-room she had become acquainted with many new people. She could not count them all when she afterward tried to do so; the introductions had been very rapid for some little time; one, so to speak, had trodden upon the heel of another. Her meditated project had transpired, and not a few of her recent acquaintances eyed her with a critical estimate of her capability to become their future leader.
She soon found herself an object of such general scrutiny that she was in danger of growing embarrassed to the verge of actual bewilderment. She was now the centre of a little group, and every member of it regarded her with more or less marked attentiveness.
"I've a tragic soul in a comic body, Mrs. Varick," said a fat little spinster, with a round moon of a face and a high color, whose name was Miss Upton. "That is the way I announce myself to all strangers. I should have gone on the stage and played Juliet if it hadn't been for my unpoetic person. But imagine a bouncing, obese Juliet! No; I realized that it would never do. I shall have to die with all my music in me, as it were."
"A great many poets have done that," said a pale young gentleman with very black hair and eyes, and an expression of ironical fatigue which seldom varied. He was Mr. Leander Prawle, and he was known to have written verses for which he himself had unbounded admiration. "Indeed," the young poet continued, lifting one thin, white hand to where his moustache was not yet, "it is hard to sing a pure and noble song with the discords of daily life about one."
"Not if you can make the world stop its discords and listen to you, Mr. Prawle," said Pauline.
"Oh, Prawle can never do that," said a broad-shouldered young blond, with a face full of drowsy reverie and hair rolled back from it in a sort of yellow mane. "He's always writing transcendental verses about Man with a capital M and the grand amelioration of Humanity with a capital H. Prawle has no color. He hates an adjective as if it were a viper. He should have lived with me in the Quartier Latin; he should have read, studied and loved the divine Théophile Gautier—most perfect of all French poets!"