"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 Georgy; and until Thorpe questioned me it had not occurred to my mind that there was anything to do at the party but to speak to Georgy if possible, or, failing that bliss, to watch her from a distance. Harry laughed at me, and discussed the beauties of the ball with Thorpe, who was fastidious and considered few girls handsome—in fact, was so minute in his criticisms that Jack, always more than chivalrous in his thoughts of women, left us, and with his hands crossed behind him looked at the pictures on the walls of an inner room quite deserted now. The conversation turned on Miss Lenox at once, and Thorpe said he was amazed to find the girl so capable of achieving an easy success and bearing it so well. "Where," he pursued with his graceful air, "did she learn those enchanting prettinesses, those wonderful little caprices of manner? Could they have been acquired in the genteel dreariness of Belfield?"
"I should like to know," rejoined Harry with disdain, "if she has not been practising them for twenty years? She flirted with Jack and Floyd here when they used to buy her a penny's worth of peppermint, before they were out of petticoats themselves. I dare say she made eyes at old Lenox when he rocked her in the cradle."
"And she is going to marry Holt? I suppose she makes the sacrifice on account of his money. He takes it quietly and doesn't mind her flirting. Is he cold, insensible, or has he such complete belief in her regard for him?"
Harry laughed: "Jack is too good himself not to believe in the goodness of others. It is just as well. Nobody sees the Devil but those who have faith in the Devil. I dare say she'll make him as good a wife as he wants: her aspirations are all for wealth, and her extravagance will be her chief fault."
Thorpe shrugged his shoulders. "She will have several faults," said he with a cynical air. "But I can forgive them all in so pretty a woman, and admire her immensely as another man's wife."