Evidently they were just parting.  Suddenly, as she passed, the boy had caught the girl in his arms there on the street corner in the daylight, and had kissed her—­not the quick, resounding smack of casual leave-taking, but a long, silent kiss that left the girl limp.

Sophy stood rooted to the spot, between horror and fascination.  The boy’s arm brought the girl upright and set her on her feet.

She took a long breath, straightened her hat, and ran on to rejoin her girl friend awaiting her calmly up the street.  She was not even flushed; but Sophy was.  Sophy was blushing hotly and burning uncomfortably, so that her eyes smarted.

Just after her late dinner on the eighth day of her Paris stay, Sophy Gold was seated in the hotel lobby.  Paris thronged with American business buyers—­those clever, capable, shrewd-eyed women who swarm on the city in June and strip it of its choicest flowers, from ball gowns to back combs.  Sophy tried to pick them from the multitude that swept past her.  It was not difficult.  The women visitors to Paris in June drop easily into their proper slots.

There were the pretty American girls and their marvellously young-looking mammas, both out-Frenching the French in their efforts to look Parisian; there were rows of fat, placid, jewel-laden Argentine mothers, each with a watchful eye on her black-eyed, volcanically calm, be-powdered daughter; and there were the buyers, miraculously dressy in next week’s styles in suits and hats—­of the old-girl type most of them, alert, self-confident, capable.

They usually returned to their hotels at six, limping a little, dog-tired; but at sight of the brightly lighted, gay hotel foyer they would straighten up like war-horses scenting battle and achieve an effective entrance from the doorway to the lift.

In all that big, busy foyer Sophy Gold herself was the one person distinctly out of the picture.  One did not know where to place her.  To begin with, a woman as irrevocably, irredeemably ugly as Sophy was an anachronism in Paris.  She belonged to the gargoyle period.  You found yourself speculating on whether it was her mouth or her nose that made her so devastatingly plain, only to bring up at her eyes and find that they alone were enough to wreck any ambitions toward beauty.  You knew before you saw it that her hair would be limp and straggling.

You sensed without a glance at them that her hands would be bony, with unlovely knuckles.

The Fates, grinning, had done all that.  Her Chicago tailor and milliner had completed the work.  Sophy had not been in Paris ten minutes before she noticed that they were wearing ’em long and full.  Her coat was short and her skirt scant.  Her hat was small.  The Paris windows were full of large and graceful black velvets of the Lillian Russell school.

“May I sit here?”

Sophy looked up into the plump, pink, smiling face of one of those very women of the buyer type on whom she had speculated ten minutes before—­a good-natured face with shrewd, twinkling eyes.  At sight of it you forgave her her skittish white-kid-topped shoes.