What it was she really kissed she had no idea. They say that male artists have been known to kiss the pallid mask of the Girl said to have been found in the Seine, but probably they have kissed, not the senseless plaster, but some more glowing inner image. But the girl thought of no young man, Greek and dead or modern and alive. Perhaps by her act she set young men expressly aside, adoring the imperishable expression instead. It was the first kiss she had ever given. There was no sex-impulse in it, and yet it was a gesture of sex. She would not have known what other gesture to employ. With a fluttering heart and a heightened colour she rejoined her aunt, and on the following day returned to London. For days after that a nameless wistfulness still lingered in her shallow brook-brown eyes. A fortnight after her return they gave a fancy-dress dance at the McGrath, and the girl made one of a supper-party of a dozen or more who, during the interval, in one of the smaller painting-rooms, settled on the floor in a wide ring, with plates of sandwiches and jelly and cakes and blancmange making a rapidly disappearing parterre of food in the middle. The ring was as noisy as a merry-go-round of painted horses on a Bank Holiday, and they played Hunt-the-Slipper, and perhaps in the scuffling there was a little crude hand-holding--though nobody held the girl's hand. Then they went back again to dance in the Antique Room, where the tall casts, the "Discobolus" and the "Gladiator," the "Germanicus" and the great writhe of the "Laocoön," had been wheeled back against the walls, and stood, like so many sightless servitors, holding wraps and shawls and the fans and oddments that had been put down on their plinths. The girl danced again. She was dressed this time as a porcelain shepherdess, in a hooped skirt of tender pink with tiny sprigs of green sown throughout it. She had borrowed the dress from one of the other girls. At supper, sitting in the ring, she had resembled a rose-peony that had been taken by its stalk and pressed down on the floor. About the slender hyacinth-stalk of her neck was a black velvet ribbon with a locket, and the thick mass of her hair peeped over the shoulders of her partners like an irregular knob of bronze lustre. Her shallow ribboned hat was on "Homer's" head, between the "Gladiator" and the "Greek Slave."