with something like a dumb ague; and a single gesture of invitation from her produced marked delirium.  All this was very like Enriquez; but on the particular occasion to which I refer, I think no one was prepared to see him begin the figure with the waving of four handkerchiefs!  Yet this he did, pirouetting, capering, brandishing his silken signals like a ballerina’s scarf in the languishment or fire of passion, until, in a final figure, where the conquered and submitting fair one usually sinks into the arms of her partner, need it be said that the ingenious Enriquez was found in the center of the floor supporting four of the dancers!  Yet he was by no means unduly excited either by the plaudits of the crowd or by his evident success with the fair.  “Ah, believe me, it is nothing,” he said quietly, rolling a fresh cigarette as he leaned against the doorway.  “Possibly, I shall have to offer the chocolate or the wine to thees girls, or make to them a promenade in the moonlight on the veranda.  It is ever so.  Unless, my friend,” he said, suddenly turning toward me in an excess of chivalrous self-abnegation, “unless you shall yourself take my place.  Behold, I gif them to you!  I vamos!  I vanish!  I make track!  I skedaddle!” I think he would have carried his extravagance to the point of summoning his four gypsy witches of partners, and committing them to my care, if the crowd had not at that moment parted before the remaining dancers, and left one of the onlookers, a tall, slender girl, calmly surveying them through gold-rimmed eyeglasses in complete critical absorption.  I stared in amazement and consternation; for I recognized in the fair stranger Miss Urania Mannersley, the Congregational minister’s niece!

Everybody knew Rainie Mannersley throughout the length and breadth of the Encinal.  She was at once the envy and the goad of the daughters of those Southwestern and Eastern immigrants who had settled in the valley.  She was correct, she was critical, she was faultless and observant.  She was proper, yet independent; she was highly educated; she was suspected of knowing Latin and Greek; she even spelled correctly!  She could wither the plainest field nosegay in the hands of other girls by giving the flowers their botanical names.  She never said “Ain’t you?” but “Aren’t you?” She looked upon “Did I which?” as an incomplete and imperfect form of “What did I do?” She quoted from Browning and Tennyson, and was believed to have read them.  She was from Boston.  What could she possibly be doing at a free-and-easy fandango?

Even if these facts were not already familiar to everyone there, her outward appearance would have attracted attention.  Contrasted with the gorgeous red, black, and yellow skirts of the dancers, her plain, tightly fitting gown and hat, all of one delicate gray, were sufficiently notable in themselves, even had they not seemed, like the girl herself, a kind of quiet protest to the glaring flounces before her.