A natural light-heartedness, of which he had glimpses from the first, returned to her.  One night, at the dance given by some of the guests to some others, she went through the gayety in joyous triumph.  She danced mostly with Lanfear, but she had other partners, and she won a pleasing popularity by the American quality of her waltzing.  Lanfear had already noted that her forgetfulness was not always so constant or so inclusive as her father had taught him to expect; Mr. Gerald’s statement had been the large, general fact from which there was sometimes a shrinking in the particulars.  While the warmth of an agreeable experience lasted, her mind kept record of it, slight or full; if the experience were unpleasant the memory was more apt to fade at once.  After that dance she repeated to her father the little compliments paid her, and told him, laughing, they were to reward him for sitting up so late as her chaperon.  Emotions persisted in her consciousness as the tremor lasts in a smitten cord, but events left little trace.  She retained a sense of personalities; she was lastingly sensible of temperaments; but names were nothing to her.  She could not tell her father who had said the nice things to her, and their joint study of her dancing-card did not help them out.

Her relation to Lanfear, though it might be a subject of international scrutiny, was hardly a subject of censure.  He was known as Dr. Lanfear, but he was not at first known as her physician; he was conjectured her cousin or something like that; he might even be her betrothed in the peculiar American arrangement of such affairs.  Personally people saw in him a serious-looking young man, better dressed and better mannered than they thought most Americans, and unquestionably handsomer, with his Spanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the Vandyke cut which was then already beginning to be rather belated.

Other Americans in the hotel were few and transitory; and if the English had any mind about Miss Gerald different from their mind about other girls, it would be perhaps to the effect that she was quite mad; by this they would mean that she was a little odd; but for the rest they had apparently no mind about her.  With the help of one of the English ladies her father had replaced the homesick Irish maid whom he had sent back to New York from Genoa, with an Italian, and in the shelter of her gay affection and ignorant sympathy Miss Gerald had a security supplemented by the easy social environment.  If she did not look very well, she did not differ from most other American women in that; and if she seemed to confide herself more severely to the safe-keeping of her physician, that was the way of all women patients.