Sallie Ambrey has not her mother’s intuition, nor, naturally, has she Mary’s experience. But she has great acumen, and--that rarest and most invaluable asset--a mind trained from babyhood to clear thinking. And, personally, I hold that she was absolutely right when she once called Captain Patch a hopeless and temperamental romantic, capable of a _grande passion_. One doesn’t associate it, somehow, with red curly hair, and a slouch, and a very frank smile on a boyish mouth and behind a pair of strong glasses. Incongruity, in a way, was the keynote of the whole thing. Diamond Harter wasn’t in the least beautiful, and certainly not charming. She was his senior by a year or two and, as Mrs. Kendal said later on, with her extraordinary gift for emphasizing the unessential: “Mrs. Harter was not, _in any sense of the word_, a lady.” One is left wondering how many “senses of the word” exist, and what they all are. A few days after the concert, we decided that we would give a dance. The Ambreys had come up to tea, as they often do on Sundays, and Mrs. Fazackerly came, and Bill Patch. I remember that Nancy Fazackerly looked pretty that day, in a hat trimmed with blue daisies and a blue cotton frock that seemed to be striped with a darker blue. (Amy Kendal, who walked up later, with Mumma, of course, said to her, “How smart you look!” in a reproving way. And Christopher Ambrey, to whom the Kendal manner is not the familiar thing that it is to us, asked me what that odious woman meant.) “This is the very place for a dance,” said Sallie, looking round the hall. “I can’t imagine why no one has thought of it before.” Sallie is always rather apt to assume that because she has not thought of a thing herself, nobody else has done so, and this is a trick, among many others, that exasperates Claire. “There were dances here before you were born or thought of, my child. It may seem very strange to you,” said Claire ironically, “but I happen to have been rather an unusually good dancer.” Her annoyance was so obvious in her voice and manner--Claire never attempts to dissemble her feelings--that Nancy Fazackerly characteristically came to the rescue. “I love to see you dance, Lady Flower,” she said earnestly. “I believe you’d even make the new jazz dances look graceful.” She said it so naturally and sincerely that I felt I was an ungrateful brute for reflecting that she had probably never in her life seen Claire dance a step.