The deep bow-window—­her favorite spot—­which enabled her to have a reception-day in connection with that of her mamma, seemed like a great basket of roses when all her friends assembled there, seated on low chairs in unstudied attitudes:  the white rose of the group was Mademoiselle d’Etaples, a specimen of pale and pensive beauty, frail almost to transparency; the Rose of Bengal was the charming Colette Odinska, a girl of Polish race, but born in Paris; the dark-red rose was Isabelle Ray-Belle she was called triumphantly—­whose dimpled cheeks flushed scarlet for almost any cause, some said for very coquetry.  Then there were three little girls called Wermant, daughters of an agent de change—­a spray of May roses, exactly alike in features, manners, and dress, sprightly and charming as little girls could be.  A little pompon rose was tiny Dorothee d’Avrigny, to whom the pet name Dolly was appropriate, for never had any doll’s waxen face been more lovely than her little round one, with its mouth shaped like a little heart—­a mouth smaller than her eyes, and these were round eyes, too, but so bright, and blue, and soft, that it was easy to overlook their too frequently startled expression.

Jacqueline had nothing in common with a rose of any kind, but she was not the less charming to look at.  Such was the unspoken reflection of a man who was well able to be a judge in such matters.  His name was Hubert Marien.  He was a great painter, and was now watching the clear-cut, somewhat Arab—­like profile of this girl—­a profile brought out distinctly against the dark-red silk background of a screen, much as we see a cameo stand out in sharp relief from the glittering stone from which the artist has fashioned it.  Marien looked at her from a distance, leaning against the fireplace of the farther salon, whence he could see plainly the corner shaded by green foliage plants where Jacqueline had made her niche, as she called it.  The two rooms formed practically but one, being separated only by a large recess without folding-doors, or ‘portires’.  Hubert Marien, from his place behind Madame de Nailles’s chair, had often before watched Jacqueline as he was watching her at this moment.  She had grown up, as it were, under his own eye.  He had seen her playing with her dolls, absorbed in her story-books, and crunching sugar-plums, he had paid her visits—­for how many years?  He did not care to count them.

And little girls bloom fast!  How old they make us feel!  Who would have supposed the most unpromising of little buds would have transformed itself so soon into what he gazed upon?  Marien, as an artist, had great pleasure in studying the delicate outline of that graceful head surmounted by thick tresses, with rebellious ringlets rippling over the brow before they were gathered into the thick braid that hung behind; and Jacqueline, although she appeared to be wholly occupied with her guests, felt the gaze that was fixed upon her, and was conscious of its magnetic influence, from which nothing would have induced her to escape even had she been able.  All the young girls were listening attentively (despite their more serious occupation of consuming dainties) to what was going on in the next room among the grown-up people, whose conversation reached them only in detached fragments.