“Yes, it’s in her!  She’s doomed, you know!  Her grandmothers before her were bad women—­regular witches, they say, with a good, big streak of yellow.  Couldn’t keep their heads on their shoulders—­couldn’t be faithful to any one man.  Don’t know as they tried!”

“I’ll bet they made it interesting for the fellow while it did last, anyway!  But this one will never be happy.  She has a tragedy in her face, if ever a woman had.  But she’s a man’s woman, all right, and she’d make life worth living if a fellow had any red blood in him.  She’s one of those women who are born for nothing else in the world but to love, and be loved.  Can’t you shoot the Count?”

“The Count!—­Hell!  He won’t be considered at all after a little!  She’ll find plenty of men glad to wake the devil in her—­just to keep her from yawning!  But she’s not very tractable even now, though her sins all lie ahead of her!  She’s altogether too cool on the surface for her make-up, but—­well, full of suggestion, and one feels a volcano surging and steaming just below the mask she wears, and has an insane desire to wake it up!  That kind of woman simply can’t help it.”

A third voice broke in on the conversation—­an older voice—­the voice of a man who had lived and observed much.

“I saw her often as a child,” he said, “a perilously wilful child, determined upon her own way, and possessed of her own fancies about this, that, and the other, which were seldom, if ever, the ideas of anyone else.  There was always plenty of excitement where she was—­always that same disturbing air!  Even with her pigtails and pinafores, one could see the woman in her eyes.  But she was a provoking little creature, always dreaming of impossible romances.  Her father had his hands full.”

“As her husband will have, poor devil!  If he’s man enough to hold her, all right.  If he is not,” with a significant shrug of the shoulders, “it’s his own lookout!”

“That old French roue hold her?  You’re dreaming!  She won’t be faithful to him a week—­if he has a handsome valet, or a half-way manly groom!  How could she?” And they laughed coarsely.

The Boy gave them a look that should have annihilated all three, but they weren’t noticing the Boy.  He could have throttled them!  How dared such lips as these pollute his darling’s name!  And yet these were society men—­they could dance with her, clasp her to them, and look into those “witch eyes”—­oh, the ignominy of it!

He looked across at Opal.  How beautiful she was in her pale green gown, her white shoulders and arms glistening beneath the electric light with the sheen of polished marble, her red-brown hair glowing with its fiery lure, while even across the room her eyes sparkled like diamonds, lighting up her whole face.  She was certainly enjoying herself—­this Circe who had tempted him across the seas.  She seemed possessed of the very spirit of mischief—­and Paul forgot himself.