'At all events you can see that it's not me,' said Jeff leniently. 'Why, just consider the points in me which she professed to consider laughable. My height! Now the last thing a woman bothers herself about in a man is his height. When there is a question of physical attractions, she looks first at his shoulders, then at his eyes, then at his feet and hands, then at his chin. If these please her his height may take care of itself; and if you won't mind my saying it, the less it has to take care of the better. Look at Napoleon Bonaparte, Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Plato, General Grant. Why, pretty nearly everybody who has stood a head and shoulders above his generation has been under five feet eight.' 'Bravo, Jeff! You are both eloquent and sagacious. Beacon Street should be proud of you.' 'Knowledge of this kind is a matter of temperament and intuition. Experience can but confirm what the soul has already divined; and if the previous divination do not exist, age and experience are just so much to the bad, if you won't mind my saying so. And so she ridiculed the fog incident?' 'She alluded to it with an apparent spice of humour,' I said diffidently. 'Dear girl,' murmured the poet tenderly. 'That seeming ridicule was almost as direct an avowal of affection as a modest woman could have made. That mutual voiceless self-revelation of ours, which my dear Campbell professes to discredit, has evidently stirred my Countess to her depths. It has aroused the potent germs of the master passion of her life. She trembles to confess herself to herself; how, then, could she do otherwise than veil herself from a stranger? and what better veil than a simulated mirth and mockery? But really now you don't need me to tell you this; it's the A, B, C of the feminine nature.' 'Jeff, you puzzle me; you are either more or less than human. At all events you are an incarnate solution of the old problem how to make the best of it. Well, what are your proximate intentions?' 'To dance the "Boston" with her this evening.' 'You will be at the ball, then?' 'Indeed, yes. Shall not you?' 'I shall; for since you are definitely resolved upon playing the donkey, I want to be in a position to hear your opening bray.' 'At ten o'clock, then; but it will be a variation upon _A Midsummer Night's Dream_,' answered the poet with imperturbable geniality; and so we parted. VIII. The ball--or rather the _soirée dansante_--was announced for nine o'clock, and at thirty minutes after that hour I passed through the doorway.