Standing in the center of the room, wearing that expression of happy radiance which admiration invariably brought to her face, her bare shoulders gleaming, her jewels blazing, she rotated upon her heel till her train wound up in a swirling eddy at her feet, out of which she bloomed like some voluptuous flower, while a chorus of "Oh’s" and "Ah’s" of laughing adulation followed the revolution of her eyes about the circuit; for the guests knew that to their hostess this little gathering was a play, and their part was to enact a vigorously approving audience. "Gentlemen," she proposed, "you are all in evening dress; but I,"—and she shrugged her bewitching shoulders naïvely,—"I have been in this gown for ages—until I hate it. Will you indulge me a little longer?" And she inclined her head in the direction of the red portières through which she had gone that first night to don the diamonds for Hampstead. Of course the gentlemen excused her, and Miss Dounay achieved another startling theatricalism by reappearing in an astonishingly short time, offering the most surprising contrast to her former self. The yellow and spangles were gone. In their place was the simplest possible gown of soft black velvet, with only a narrow band passing over the shoulders and framing a bust like marble for its whiteness against the black. The dress was entirely without ornament, presenting a supreme achievement of the art of the modiste, in that it appeared not so much to be a gown as a bolt of velvet, suddenly caught up and draped to screen her figure chastely but beautifully, at the same time it revealed and even emphasized those swelling curves and long lines which lost themselves elusively in the baffling pliancy of her remarkable figure. The hair was worn low upon the neck, and the jewels which had blazed in her coiffure like a dazzling crown were no longer in evidence. With them had gone the pendants from her ears, and that coruscating circlet of diamonds from the neck, which was her chief pride and most valuable single possession. There was not even a band of gold upon her arms, nor a ring upon her tapering finger. Hence what the admiring circle seemed to see was not something brilliant because bedizened, but a creature exquisite because genuine, a beauty depending for its power solely upon nature’s comeliness. No woman with less beauty or less art, desiring to be admired as Marien Dounay passionately did, could have dared this contrast successfully. No one who knew men less thoroughly than she would have understood that for a purely professional artist to attain this look of a simple womanly woman was the greatest possible triumph, stirring every instinct of admiration and of chivalry.