She is air, open and coursing: she is sunlight. Her solidity is resilient. She has a body which is a luminous smile, impervious and ruthless. “What are you doing here?” I ask her. For her antithesis is so exact ... the velvety music, the slow whining bodies ... that she is clear like a poem in a world of inarticulations. “Let’s talk,” she says. “It will be good for you to talk. Your mood is so heavy.” “What are you doing here?” “Where else did you expect to find me?” “I expected to find you nowhere.” “Then you don’t know who I am.” “You are Mildred Fayn. I have seen you: and I have heard of you.” “Well, then? Did you not hear that I dance, that I motor, that I ride? Did you not hear that I flirt?” “Whatever I heard and saw has naught to do with you.” “You look, Doctor Mark, as if you had made a discovery. And you look solemn.” “I am pleased.” “You are like a child, perhaps? Most solemn when most pleased?” “Children have the gift of discovery--and of wonder.” Suddenly she was serious. She had glanced dazzlingly around me. Now it was as if she came straight forward. “I’ll dare be ‘serious’ with you,” she murmured. She looked full at me: her eyes had a crisp tenderness, like some immortal fruit ever upon the Springlike verge of ripeness. I knew that she understood, although the words perhaps were not within her mind, how laughter is oblique: how seriousness is the full face of joy. We sat in a little bower cut off from the hall by palms. It became a cool and fluid haven from the hall--from the hall’s synthetic sun. She was quiet. She folded her frail hands in her lap and raised her head. A smile flickered at her mouth like a butterfly at a fruit. She dispelled it. “It’s hard to sit serious,” she whispered. “It is so revealing.” Again, instantly, she understood. “Yes: we don’t mind being naked when we are in motion. It must be that motion covers us? The dance, the swim. But being still, and being seen....” “Laughter,” I said, “is a shift we wear like motion.” There was a pause. I illogically broke it: “You are uncovered, yet you are at ease.” She laughed: “No! You are wrapping me up in your observations about me.” “Why do they cover, rather than reveal you?” “Why? Because they are illusions.” “Oh!” “Aren’t they romantic and inaccurate? You see, I _am_ a girl who dances and motors and flirts.” Her smile was indulgent: as if she invited me, knowing how hard it was, to candor. “How can you expect me to know you so swiftly?” “Why not--swiftly?” she said.