"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"
Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky, the glimmer of lights far away, the clustering shadows against the white field of snow, the vague ghostly shapes of the sycamores—all these things endowed her with the potency of romantic adventure. In the winter night she seemed to him to exhale the roving sweetness of spring. Then she spoke, and the sharp brightness of his vision was clouded by the old sense of unreality.
"They treated me as if I were a piece of bunting or a flower in a pot," she said. "They left me alone in the dressing-room. No one spoke to me, though they must have known who I was. They know, all of them, that I am the Governor's daughter."
With a start he brought himself back from the secret places. "But I thought you carried your head very high," he answered, "and you did not appear to lack partners." Some small ironic demon that seemed to dwell in his brain and yet to have no part in his real thought, moved him to add indiscreetly: "I thought you danced every dance with Julius Gershom. That's the name of that dark fellow who's a politician of doubtful cast, isn't it?"
She made a petulant gesture, and the red wings in her hat vibrated like the wings of a bird in flight. There flashed though his mind while he watched her the memory of a cardinal he had seen in a cedar tree against the snow-covered landscape. Strange that he could never get away from the thought of a bird when he looked at her.
"Oh, Julius Gershom! I despise him!"
She shivered, and he asked with a sympathy he had not displayed for mental discomforts: "Aren't you dreadfully chilled? This kind of thing is a risk, you know. You might catch influenza—or anything."
"Yes, I might, if there is any about," she replied tartly, and he saw with relief that her petulance had faded to dull indifference. "I was obliged to dance with somebody," she resumed after a minute, "I couldn't sit against the wall the whole evening, could I? And nobody else asked me,—but I don't like him any the better for that."
"And your father? Does he dislike him also?" he asked.
"How can one tell? He says he is useful." There was a playful tenderness in her voice.