Viola was sitting back rather listlessly, with her hands clasped in her lap. She was dressed simply but prettily in gray, and wore no hat. The color was the one most perfectly suited to harmonize with her eyes and hair. Among the handsome and well-dressed women that surrounded her, she preserved the same suggestion of distinction and superiority that Letitia had recognized when she saw her in her own ragged drawing-room. Holding out the glass, Letitia turned to Gault, who was sitting silent in the shelter of the curtain, and said: "Colonel Reed's sitting down there." He gave the slightest possible start, and moving forward, looked in the direction she indicated. "So he is," he said in an uninterested tone, "and with his daughter." Unfortunately, Tod McCormick, who had drawn up as close to Letitia as his chair would permit, heard this short dialogue and pricked up his ears. "Colonel Reed," he said vivaciously, "and his daughter? Where?" He bent forward, his lean neck stretched out, his weazened visage full of a curiosity that was only naïvely boyish, but that on his ugly and insignificant features acquired a mean and disagreeable air. "By gracious!" he said, after surveying the colonel with a knowing grin. "At the opera, in the best seats, dressed like the lilies of the field--oh, you old rascal!" He wagged his head at the colonel with a look of wicked knowledge that he was extremely fond of assuming. "What do you mean?" said Letitia, twisting round on her chair so that she could see him. "What makes you call him a rascal?" "Oh, old rogue! old rogue!" repeated Tod, as though he had secret and masonic intelligence of serious misdeeds in the colonel's past. "And that's his daughter? Ain't she a peach!" John Gault moved uneasily and looked back into the shadows of the box. Letitia, feeling uncomfortable, said hurriedly: "Yes, indeed. She's prettier than anybody here, I think." "Except you, Tishy," said Tod, but, it must be admitted, in an absent tone. He leaned farther forward, his eyes on the girl in the seat below, the smile on his face changing from one of whimsical malice to the slow, pleased grin of affected admiration. "Well, she can draw my salary! She can have the key of my trunk!" "Have you ever seen her before?" asked Letitia. "No, but I've heard of her. Everybody's heard of her." "It's very odd; I never did till the other day." "You mightn't have. The boys, I mean. All of a sudden, every feller's begun askin' every other feller if he knows Colonel Reed's daughter. She's sort of in the air, like microbes." "Why should she be?" Tod shrugged. "Oh, a girl as pretty as that can't be expected to blush unseen down in South Park forever."