The floor was good, the music inspiriting, her programme was filled from beginning to end. She tried bravely to enjoy the evening in her old, unthinking fashion, and was furious with herself because she failed. There was no use denying the fact: something had disappeared which had been there before, the absence of which strangely transformed the scene--an interest, a zest, a sense of mystery and uncertainty. They had lain so far in the background that she had not realised their presence, but they had been present all the same. Each strange man to whom she had been introduced held within his black-coated form a dazzling possibility; her young eyes searched his face even as his searched hers--alert, critical, inquiring; for the moment each represented to the other the mystery, the fascination of sex. After the dance, as they sat talking lightly in some cool shade the inner voice in each brain was holding a council of its own: "Who, and what are you, inside that smiling form; what sort of a man, what sort of a woman? Do you, can you, by any possible chance, belong to _me_?" The modern young man and maiden may indignantly deny that such a feeling, conscious or unconscious, has any bearing on their social joys. Vanna belonged to an age far more frankly sentimental than to-day, but she also protested, and felt humiliated when convicted against her will. Yet what shame can there be in the acknowledgment of a natural magnetic force? Empty a ballroom of all except relations within the prescribed calendar, set a man to dance with his sisters and aunts, a girl with her brothers and uncles--would any one of the number dare to maintain that enjoyment continued in the same ratio? Vanna was fond of dancing, but not to the same extent as Jean, who often declared that she would waltz with a clothes-prop sooner than not waltz at all. With Vanna the enjoyment of movement was always subservient to the mental pleasure of meeting and talking to new partners. She preferred a good conversationalist to a good waltzer, but this evening the ordinary topics of the ballroom seemed painfully lacking in savour; she could feel in them no interest, no merriment, no curiosity; her partner's words seemed to float past, a dull, wearisome echo that had no meaning in her ears. She was as one who had returned home after long wandering in a foreign land, to find herself helplessly out of her element. She looked at the gay stream of dancers as across a gulf. Two days ago she had been one of themselves, as carelessly happy, as confidently gay; now, after the passage of a few short hours, she stood apart, conscious through all her nature that she had outgrown a stage; had passed on, and left her friends behind.