dances, Bernard Shaw, Campanini and the Progressive party; with a
perfectly appropriate and final comment on each.

Rose didn't care. She was having a wonderful time--a new kind of
wonderful time. No longer gazing, big-eyed like little Cinderella at a
pageant some fairy godmother's whim had admitted her to, but consciously
gazed upon; she was the show to-night, and she knew it. Her low, finely
modulated voice so rich in humor, so varied in color, had to-night an
edge on it that carried it beyond those she was immediately speaking to
and drew looks that found it hard to get away again. For the first time
in her life, with full self-consciousness, she was producing effects,
thrilling with the exercise of a power as obedient to her will as
electricity to the manipulator of a switchboard.

She was like a person driving an aeroplane, able to move in all three
dimensions. Pretty soon, of course, she'd have to come hack to earth,
where certain monstrously terrifying questions were waiting for her.

Madame Gréville's final apothegm had suggested one of them. Was all she
valued in the world just so much fairy gold that would change over night
into dry leaves in her treasure chest because she had never earned
it--paid the price for it that life relentlessly exacts for all we may
be allowed to call ours?

Her tragi-comic scene with Rodney suggested another. What was her value
to him? Was she something enormously desirable when he wanted his hand
held and his eyes kissed, but an infernal nuisance when serious matters
were concerned? A fine and luxurious dissipation, not dangerous unless
recklessly indulged in, but to be kept strictly in her place? Before her
talk with Randolph she'd have laughed at that.