“And poor Joan,” said Rose, after a palpable silence, but evenly enough, “who has thought all along that she was attracting a man by her intelligence and her understanding, and all that, wakes up to find that she’s been married for her long eyelashes, and her nice voice—­and her pretty ankles.  That’s a little hard on her, don’t you think, if she’s been taking herself seriously?”

“Nine times in ten,” he said, “she’s fooling herself.  She’s taken her own ankles much more seriously than she has her mind.  She’s capable of real sacrifices for them—­for her sex charm, that is.  She’ll undergo a real discipline for it.  Intelligence she regards as a gift.  She thinks the witty conversation she’s capable of after dinner, on a cocktail and two glasses of champagne, or the bright letters she can write to a friend, are real exercises of her mind—­real work.  But work isn’t done like that.  Work’s overcoming something that resists; and there’s strain in it, and pain and discouragement.”

In her cheeks the red flared up brighter.  She smiled again—­not her own smile—­one at any rate that was new to her.

“You don’t ‘solve an intellectual problem’ then;” she quoted, “’by having your hand held, or your eyes kissed?’”

Whereupon he shot a look at her and observed that evidently he wasn’t as much of a pioneer as he thought.

She did not rise to this cast, however.  “All right;” she said, “admitting that her ankles are serious and her mind isn’t, what is Joan going to do about it?”

“It’s easier to say what she’s not to do,” he decided, after hesitating a moment.  “Her fatal mistake will be to despise her ankles without disciplining her mind.  If she will take either one of them seriously, or both for that matter—­it’s possible—­she’ll do very well.”

He could, no doubt, have continued on the theme indefinitely, but the table turned the other way just then and Rose took up an alleged conversation with the man at her right which lasted until they left the table and included such topics as indoor golf, woman’s suffrage, the new dances, Bernard Shaw, Campanini and the Progressive party; with a perfectly appropriate and final comment on each.

Rose didn’t care.  She was having a wonderful time—­a new kind of wonderful time.  No longer gazing, big-eyed like little Cinderella at a pageant some fairy godmother’s whim had admitted her to, but consciously gazed upon; she was the show to-night, and she knew it.  Her low, finely modulated voice so rich in humor, so varied in color, had to-night an edge on it that carried it beyond those she was immediately speaking to and drew looks that found it hard to get away again.  For the first time in her life, with full self-consciousness, she was producing effects, thrilling with the exercise of a power as obedient to her will as electricity to the manipulator of a switchboard.

She was like a person driving an aeroplane, able to move in all three dimensions.  Pretty soon, of course, she’d have to come hack to earth, where certain monstrously terrifying questions were waiting for her.