ODD was subtly glad of a cold that kept him in bed and indoors for several days. He wrote of his sorry plight to Katherine, and said he would see her at the Meltons’ on Monday. Hilda was to come; that had been decided on the very evening of their last walk. He had been a witness of the merry colloquy over the lengthened dress, a colloquy that might, Odd felt, have held an embarrassing consciousness for Katherine had she not treated it with such whole-hearted gayety.

The Archinards had not yet arrived when Odd reached Mrs. Melton’s apartment—one of the most magnificent in the houses that line the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne—and after greeting his hostess, he waited for half-an-hour in a condition of feverish restlessness, painfully apparent to himself, before he saw in the sparkling distance Katherine’s smooth dark head, the Captain’s correctly impassive good looks, and Hilda’s loveliness for once in a setting that displayed it. Peter thrilled with a delicious and ridiculous pride as, with a susceptibility as acute as a fond mother’s, he saw—felt, even—the stir, the ripple of inevitable conquest spread about her entry. The involuntary attention of a concourse of people certainly constitutes homage, however unconscious of aim be the conqueror. To Odd, the admiration, like the scent of a bed of heliotrope in the turning of a garden path, seemed to fill the very air with sudden perfume. “Her dear little head,” “Her lovely little head,” he was saying to himself as he advanced to meet her. He naturally spoke first to Katherine, and received her condolences on his cold, which she feared, by his jaded and feverish air, he had not got rid of. Then, turning to Hilda—

“The white satin does,” he said, smiling down at her. Katherine did not depend on beauty, and need fear no comparison even beside her sister. She was talking with her usual quiet gayety to half-a-dozen people already.

“See that Hilda, in her embarras de choix, doesn’t become too much embarrassed,” she said to Peter. “Exercise for her a brotherly discretion.”

The Captain was talking to Mrs. Melton—a pretty little woman with languid airs. She had lived for years in Paris, and considered herself there a most necessary element of careful conservatism. Her exclusiveness, which she took au grand serieux, highly amused Katherine. Katherine knew her world; it was wider than Mrs. Melton’s. She walked with a kindly ignoring of barriers, did not trouble herself at all how people arrived as long as they were there. She was as tolerant of a millionaire parvenu as might be a duchess with a political entourage to manipulate; and she found Mrs. Melton’s anxious social self-satisfaction humorous—a fact of which Mrs. Melton was unaware, although she, like other people, thought Katherine subtly impressive. Mrs. Melton was rather dull too, and a few grievances whispered behind her fan in Katherine’s ear en passant—for subject, the unfortunate and eternal nouveau riche—made pleasant gravity difficult; but Katherine did not let Mrs. Melton know that she found her dull and funny.

Hilda for the moment was left alone with Odd, and he seized the opportunity for inscribing himself for five waltzes.

“I will be greedy. I wrest these from the hungry horde I see advancing, led by your father and Mrs. Melton.”

He had not claimed the first waltz, and watched her while she danced it—charmingly and happily as a girl should. She was beautiful, surprisingly beautiful. A loveliness in the carriage of the little head, with its heightened coils of hair, seemed new to Odd. No one else’s hair was done like that, nor grew so about the forehead. The white satin was a trifle too big for her. A lace sash held it loosely to her waist, and floated and curved with the curves of her long flowing skirt. His waltz came, and he would not let his wonder at the significance of his felicity carry him too far into conjecture.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, as they joined the eddy circling around Mrs. Melton’s ballroom.

“So much; thanks to you.” Her parted lips smiled, half at him, half at the joy of dancing. “I had almost forgotten how delicious it was.”

“More delicious than the studio, isn’t it?”

“You shall not tempt me to disloyalty. How pretty, too! De la Touche could do it—all light and movement and color. I should like to come out of my demi-tints and have a try myself! What pretty blue shadows everywhere with the golden lights. See on the girls’ throats. There is the good of the studio! One sees lovely lights and shadows on ugly heads! Isn’t that worth while?”

Odd’s eyes involuntarily dropped to the blue shadow on Hilda’s throat.

“Everything you do is worth while—from painting to dancing. You dance very well.”

The white fragility of her neck and shoulders, in the generous display of which he recognized the gown’s quondam possessor, gave him a little pang of fear. She looked extremely delicate, and the youthfulness of cheek and lip pathetic. That wretched drudgery! For, even through the happy candor of her eyes, he saw a deep fatigue—the long fatigue of a weary monotony of days. But in neither eyes nor voice was there a tinge of the aloofness—the reserve that had formerly chilled him. To-night Hilda seemed near once more; almost the little friend of ten years ago.

“You dance well, too, Mr. Odd,” she said.

“I very seldom waltz.”

“In my honor then?”

“Solely in your honor. I haven’t waltzed five times in one evening with one young woman—for ages!”

“You haven’t waltzed five times with me yet. I may wear you out!”

“What an implied reflection on my forty years! Do I seem so old to you, Hilda?”

“No; I don’t think of you as old.”

“But I think of you as young, very young, deliciously young.”

“Deliciously?” she repeated. “That is a fallacy, I think. Youth is sad; doesn’t see things in value; everything is blacker or whiter than reality, so that one is disappointed or desperate all the time.”

“And you, Hilda?”

Her eyes swept his with a sweet, half-playful defiance.

“Don’t be personal.”

“But you were. And, after the other day—your declaration of contentment.”

“Everything is comparative. I was generalizing. I hate people who talk about themselves,” Hilda added; “it’s the worst kind of immodesty. Material and mental braggarts are far more endurable than the people who go round telling about their souls.”

“Severe, rigid child!” Odd laughed, and, after a little pause, laughed again. “You are horribly reserved, Hilda.”

“Very sage when one has nothing to show. Silence covers such a multitude of sins. If one is consistently silent, people may even imagine that one isn’t dull,” said Hilda maliciously.

“You are dull and silent, then?”

“I have few opinions; that is, perhaps, dulness.”

“It may be a very wide cleverness.”

“Yes; it may be. Now, Mr. Odd, the next waltz is yours too, you know. You have quite a cluster here. Let us sit out the next. I should like an ice.”

Odd fetched the ice and sat down beside her on a small sofa in a corner of the ballroom. Katherine passed, dancing; her dark eyes flashed upon them a glance that might have been one of amusement. Odd was conscious of a painful effort in his answering smile.

Hilda’s eyes, as she ate her ice, followed her sister with a fond contemplation.

“Isn’t that dress becoming to her? The shade of deepening, changing rose.”

“Your dress, too, Hilda, is lovely.”

“Do you notice dresses, care about them?”

“I think I do, sometimes; not in detail as a woman would, but in the blended effect of dress and wearer.”

“I love beautiful dresses. I think this dress is beautiful. Have you noticed the line it makes from breast to hem, that long, unbroken line? I think that line the secret of elegance. In some gowns one sees one has visions of crushed ribs, don’t you think?”

Odd listened respectfully, his mouth twisted a little by that same smile that he still felt to be painful. “And is not this lace gathered around the shoulders pretty too?” Hilda turned to him for inspection.

“You will talk about your clothes, but you will not talk about yourself, Hilda.” Odd had put on his eyeglasses and was obediently studying her gown.

“The lace is mamma’s. Poor mamma; I know she is lonely. It does seem hard to be left alone when other people are enjoying themselves. She has Meredith’s last novel, however. I began it with her. Mr. Odd, I am doing all the talking. You talk now.”

“About Meredith, your dress, or you?”

“About yourself, if you please.”

“It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even less interested in me than you were in yourself.”

Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt that his eyes held hers with a force which almost compelled her—

“No; I am very much interested in you.” Odd was silent, studying her face with much the same expression that he had studied her gown—the expression of painfully controlled emotion.

“There is nothing comparably interesting in me,” he said; “I have had my story, or at least I have missed my chance to have a story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in the world and didn’t.”

“And your books?”

“They are as negative as I am.”

“Yet they have helped me to live.” Hilda looked hard at him while she spoke, and a sudden color swept into her face; no confusion, but the emotion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned white.

“Helped you to live, Hilda!” he almost stammered; “my gropings!”

“You may call them gropings, but they led me. Perhaps you were like Virgil to Statius, in Dante. You know? You bore your light behind and lit my path!” She smiled, adding: “I suppose you think you have failed because you have reached no dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you yourself praise noble failure and scorn cheap success.”

“I didn’t even know you read my books.”

“I know your books very well; much better than I know you.”

“Don’t say that. I hope that any worth in me is in them.”

“One would have to survey your life as a whole to be sure of that. Perhaps you do even better than you write.”

“Ah, no, no; I can praise the books by that comparison.” His voice stumbled a little incoherently, and Hilda, rising, said with a smile—

“Shall we dance?”

In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, which shared the dance’s circling propensities, Odd held fast to one fixed kernel of desire; he must hear from Hilda’s lips why she had refused Allan Hope.

An uneasy consciousness of Katherine crossed his mind once and again with a dull ache of self-reproach, all the more insistent from his realization that its cause was not so much the infidelity to Katherine as that Hilda would think him a sorry villain.

Katherine seemed to be dancing and enjoying herself. She knew that his energy this evening was on Hilda’s account; he had claimed the responsibility for Hilda. Katherine would not consider herself neglected, of that Peter felt sure, relying, with perhaps a display of the dulness she had discovered in him, upon her confidence and common sense. Outwardly, at least, he would never betray that confidence; there was some rather dislocated consolation in that.

Hilda was a little breathless when he came to claim her for the second cluster of waltzes. It was near the end ............