Misses Julia Wilkes and Milly Center were in the Millard parlour with Cloanthus Fortisque and Billy Dulger. They saw the stranger gentlemen arrive, and Milly felt her _volage_ little heart expand toward Ambient, that rosebud of Albion. She had a lively imagination for flirtations and immediately built an ideal vista with a finale of a kneeling scene, Ambient, in tears, offering his heart and a dukedom. She was not quite decided whether to raise him from his entrancement by a tap of fan, as wand, or to leave him in that comical position and call in a friend to witness her disdained triumph. “Go, Mr. Dulger,” said Milly, with the despotism of a miss in her position, “and find out who they are--particularly that handsome young man in the curious coat, lovely complexion, and mutton-chops. He looks so sweet.” Poor Dulger, compelled to prepare the way for a possible rival, went off savagely. “I’ll make her pay for all this sometime,” he murmured, with clenched fists. Dulger was fast getting desperate. He had been with this young fair one a centripetal dangler or gyroscope for years. Milly had taken his bouquets all her winters, without regard to expense. But other bouquets she had likewise taken, to the dismay of his faithful heart. When cleverer men, or bigger men, or men with more regular features or less sporadic moustache, came, yielding to Miss Milly’s seducing attentions,--and she was not chary of them,--poor Dulger sat in the background, looking at his tightish new boots, and bit his thumb at these cleverer, bigger, handsomer. He could not understand the world-wide discursiveness of the clever men, nor in truth, did Milly, but she had tact enough to see when her locutor thought he had said a witty thing, and then she could give a pretty laugh; or when it was a poetical, sentimental thing, she could look down and softly sigh. A man must have flattery for his vanity as much as sugar for his coffee, and Milly was very liberal of that sweet condiment. Her charm lasted with the clever men days, weeks, months, according to their necessities for unintelligent flattering sympathy and the frequency of their interviews.