“I have never heard you do anything else,” said Rowland, deliberately, having decided that he owed her no compliments.

“Very good.  I like your frankness.  It ’s quite true.  You see, I am a strange girl.  To begin with, I am frightfully egotistical.  Don’t flatter yourself you have said anything very clever if you ever take it into your head to tell me so.  I know it much better than you.  So it is, I can’t help it.  I am tired to death of myself; I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.  If a person wished to do me a favor I would say to him, ’I beg you, with tears in my eyes, to interest me.  Be strong, be positive, be imperious, if you will; only be something,—­something that, in looking at, I can forget my detestable self!’ Perhaps that is nonsense too.  If it is, I can’t help it.  I can only apologize for the nonsense I know to be such and that I talk—­oh, for more reasons than I can tell you!  I wonder whether, if I were to try, you would understand me.”

“I am afraid I should never understand,” said Rowland, “why a person should willingly talk nonsense.”

“That proves how little you know about women.  But I like your frankness.  When I told you the other day that you displeased me, I had an idea you were more formal,—­how do you say it?—­more guinde.  I am very capricious.  To-night I like you better.”

“Oh, I am not guinde,” said Rowland, gravely.

“I beg your pardon, then, for thinking so.  Now I have an idea that you would make a useful friend—­an intimate friend—­a friend to whom one could tell everything.  For such a friend, what would n’t I give!”

Rowland looked at her in some perplexity.  Was this touching sincerity, or unfathomable coquetry?  Her beautiful eyes looked divinely candid; but then, if candor was beautiful, beauty was apt to be subtle.  “I hesitate to recommend myself out and out for the office,” he said, “but I believe that if you were to depend upon me for anything that a friend may do, I should not be found wanting.”

“Very good.  One of the first things one asks of a friend is to judge one not by isolated acts, but by one’s whole conduct.  I care for your opinion—­I don’t know why.”

“Nor do I, I confess,” said Rowland with a laugh.

“What do you think of this affair?” she continued, without heeding his laugh.

“Of your ball?  Why, it ’s a very grand affair.”

“It ’s horrible—­that ’s what it is!  It ’s a mere rabble!  There are people here whom I never saw before, people who were never asked.  Mamma went about inviting every one, asking other people to invite any one they knew, doing anything to have a crowd.  I hope she is satisfied!  It is not my doing.  I feel weary, I feel angry, I feel like crying.  I have twenty minds to escape into my room and lock the door and let mamma go through with it as she can.  By the way,” she added in a moment, without a visible reason for the transition, “can you tell me something to read?”