The curtain went up again to a quick-step, to clinking steel, and the sound of light marching feet.  An instant after forty young women were rhythmically advancing and retreating before the footlights, picturesquely habited in a military costume comprising powdered wigs, three-cornered hats, gold-embroidered blue coats, flesh-colored tights, and kid top-boots, which dated uncertainly from the middle ages.  They sang, as they crossed their varyingly shapely legs, stamped their feet, and formed into figures no drill-book ever saw, a chorus of which the refrain was

   “Oh, it never matters, matters,
   Though his coat be tatters, tatters,
   His good sword rust-incrusted and his songs all sung,
   The maids will flatter, flatter,
   And foes will scatter, scatter,
   For a soldier is soldier while his heart is young,”

the last line accompanied by a smiling flirt of their eyes over their shoulders and a kick to the rear as they wheeled, which evoked the unstinted appreciation of the house.  The girls had the unvarying pink-and-white surfaces of their profession, but under it they obviously differed much, and the age and emaciation and ugliness among them had its common emphasis in the contrast of their smart masculine attire with the distressingly feminine outlines of their figures.  “I should have thought it impossible to make a woman absolutely hideous by a dress that revealed her form,” said Kendal to himself, as the jingling and the dancing and the music went on in the glare before him, “but, upon my word—­” He paused suddenly.  She wasn’t absolutely hideous, that tall girl with the plume and the sword, who maneuvered always in front of the company—­the lieutenant in charge.  Indeed, she was comely every way, slight and graceful, and there was a singular strong beauty in her face, which was enhanced by the rouge and the powder, and culminated in the laugh in her eyes and upon her lips—­a laugh which meant enjoyment, excitement, exhilaration.

It grew upon Kendal that none of the chorus girls approached Elfrida in the abandon with which they threw themselves into the representation—­that all the others were more conscious than she of the wide-hipped incongruity of their role.  To the man who beheld her there in an absolutely new world of light and color and course jest it seemed that she was perfectly oblivious of any other, and that her personality was the most aggressive, the most ferociously determined to be made the most of, on the stage.  As the chorus ceased a half-grown youth remarked to his companion in front, “But the orficer’s the one, Dave!  Ain’t she fly!” and the words coming out distinctly in the moment of after-silence when the applause was over, set the pit laughing for two or three yards around.  Whereat Kendal, with an assortment of feelings which he took small pleasure in analyzing later, got up and went out.  People looked up angrily at him as he stumbled over their too numerous feet in doing so—­he was spoiling a solo of some pathos by Mr. Golightly Ticke in the character of a princely refugee, a fur-trimmed mantle, and shoes with buckles.