It made you think of everything springing and singing and blooming and sweet.  Its expression was “blossomy, nightingale-y”; atilt with glee and grace.  And that was the way she looked and seemed.  If you spoke to her suddenly, the head turned as a bird’s does, with a small, shy, all-alive movement; and the bright eye glanced up at you, ready to catch electric meanings from your own.  When she talked to you in return, she talked all over; with quiet, refined radiations of life and pleasure in each involuntary turn and gesture; the blossom of her face lifted and swayed like that of a flower delicately poised upon its stalk.  She was like a flower chatting with a breeze.

She forgot altogether, as a present fact, that she looked pretty; but she had known it once, when she dressed herself, and been glad of it; and something lasted from the gladness just enough to keep out of her head any painful, conscious question of how she was seeming.  That, and her innate sense of things proper and refined, made her manners what Mrs. Van Alstyne pronounced them,—­“exquisite.”

That was all Mrs. Van Alstyne waited to find out.  She did not go deep; hence she took quick fancies or dislikes, and a great many of them.

She got Rosamond over into a corner with herself, and they had everybody round them.  All the people in the room were saying how lovely Miss Holabird looked to-night.  For a little while that seemed a great and beautiful thing.  I don’t know whether it was or not.  It was pleasant to have them find it out; but she would have been just as lovely if they had not.  Is a party so very particular a thing to be lovely in?  I wonder what makes the difference.  She might have stood on that same square of the Turkey carpet the next day and been just as pretty.  But, somehow, it seemed grand in the eyes of us girls, and it meant a great deal that it would not mean the next day, to have her stand right there, and look just so, to-night.

In the midst of it all, though, Ruth saw something that seemed to her grander,—­another girl, in another corner, looking on,—­a girl with a very homely face; somebody’s cousin, brought with them there.  She looked pleased and self-forgetful, differently from Rose in her prettiness; she looked as if she had put herself away, comfortably satisfied; this one looked as if there were no self put away anywhere.  Ruth turned round to Leslie Goldthwaite, who stood by.

“I do think,” she said,—­“don’t you?—­it’s just the bravest and strongest thing in the world to be awfully homely, and to know it, and to go right on and have a good time just the same;—­every day, you see, right through everything!  I think such people must be splendid inside!”

“The most splendid person I almost ever knew was like that,” said Leslie.  “And she was fifty years old too.”

“Well,” said Ruth, drawing a girl’s long breath at the fifty years, “it was pretty much over then, wasn’t it?  But I think I should like—­just once—­to look beautiful at a party!”