I must now write it down that she was not a type of English beauty. She was not, I mean, queenly, impassive, never-anything-but-her-cool-calm-self. Tonight, for instance, her eyes were as I had never seen them. There danced in them the merriest glitter, which was more than a mere glorification of the ordinary merry glitter—which scores of girls possess at every ball. To begin with, there was a diabolical abandon in Eva’s glitter, which raised it instantly above the common herd’s. And behind it all was that very misty mist. I don’t know whether all men have seen that mist; but I am sure that no man has seen it more than once; and, from what I’ve seen of the average man, I doubt if most of them have ever seen it at all. Well, there it was for me to see in Eva Eversleigh’s eyes that night at supper. It made me think of things unspeakable. I felt a rush of classic aestheticism: Arcadia, Helen of Troy, the happy valleys of the early Greeks. Supper: I believe I gave her oyster _pâtés_. But I was far away. Deep, deep, deep in Eva’s eyes I saw a craft sighting, ’neath a cloudless azure sky, the dark blue Symplegades; heard in my ears the jargon, loud and near me, of the sailors; and faintly o’er the distance of the dead-calm sea rose intermittently the sound of brine-foam at the clashing rocks.... As we sat there _tête-à-tête_, she smiled across the table at me with such perfect friendliness, it seemed as though a magic barrier separated our two selves from all the chattering, rustling crowd around us. When she spoke, a little quiver of feeling blended adorably with the low, sweet tones of her voice. We talked, indeed, of trifles, but with just that charming hint of intimacy which men friends have who may have known one another from birth, and may know one another for a lifetime, but never become bores, never change. Only when it comes between a woman and a man, it is incomparably finer. It is the talk, of course, of lovers who have not realised they are in love. “The two last waltzes,” I murmured, when parting with her. She nodded. I roamed the Gunton-Cresswells’s rooms awaiting them. She danced those two last waltzes with strangers. The thing was utterly beyond me at the time. Looking back, I am still amazed to what lengths deliberate coquetry can go. She actually took pains to elude me, and gave those waltzes to strangers. From being comfortably rocked in the dark blue waters of a Grecian sea, I was suddenly transported to the realities of the ballroom. My theoretical love for Eva was now a substantial truth. I was in an agony of desire, in a frenzy of jealousy. I wanted to hurl the two strangers to opposite corners of the ballroom, but civilisation forbade it.