One by one Mrs. Cortlandt introduced the young people, girls and boys, to Lady Harrowdene. Beth thus knew for the first time who were invited to her birthday party; she found that they were the Tanagers and Bluebirds and the other young people whom she had met, her cousins’ friends. This did not lessen her shyness. Beth had never made the least progress in acquaintanceship outside her family that winter, and now the fear of what might be required of her at a party given in her honor oppressed her. Aunt Alida must have known this for she announced: “This is Beth’s party, but she is as much in the dark in regard to it as any of you. Lady Harrowdene has surprises for you all, so you are to consider her as your hostess and Beth as a sort of Appendix Hostess. We are all under Lady Harrowdene’s orders.” “Very well, then,” began Lady Harrowdene, accepting her responsibility; “you must know that you are each to consider yourself a chrysalis, if you please! You did not know why you were bidden wear that yellow silk covering, but this is the reason: you are each a chrysalis. Now, we are to repair to the dancing room, each chrysalis when it--‘it’ is surely the correct word for a chrysalis!--when it is ready.” She led the way, a dazzling apparition in white and green. Beth saw with unspeakable joy that she wore on her hair something that must have been a coronet! What rapture it gave her to know that her hostess, Beth Bristead’s hostess at her birthday party, rightfully wore a countess’s coronet! “‘Kind hearts are more than coronets And simple faith than Norman blood,’” she said to her own great dismay, and not because that was what she was thinking, but because Lady Harrowdene’s coronet put the words on her tongue. She was horrified when a girl at her elbow heard her quotation and laughed. The ballroom was beautiful with flowers, the orchestra was playing irresistible dance music as the chrysalides slid, in their quiet dull color, into the brilliant light. The daylight was excluded by heavy screens and the electric candles turned the February afternoon into night. In a moment every chrysalis was dancing and they danced for an hour. Then the music died away into the faintest echo and the chrysalides stopped dancing, wondering what was to happen. A curtain concealing a stage at the end of the long room was withdrawn by invisible hands and upon this stage flitted fairy figures, so beautiful, so fairylike, as they half danced, half flew on the invisible wires across the stage, that Beth caught her breath in delight, so keen that it overwhelmed her.