She had been furious with herself more than once for her secret pride in her eyelashes and had considered mutilation, but after various specious excuses: the breaking of her mother’s heart, their value as a sun-screen, etc., she had finally admitted she would as readily cut off her nose. Once, when she caught herself examining her fine Carteret profile with the aid of a hand-mirror, she had thrown the glass out of the window and filched from her father’s vocabulary. It had been a matter of will induced by a special neurosis, but the accomplishment had stopped just short of perfection, and the effort to make herself over into a girl with a girl’s easy grace of carriage and mental lineaments, made her feel bruised all over. It would have been almost as easy for a cripple to stand erect and run a race. She was not only disoriented but apprehensive. Her semi-masculine garb and mental posturing had been like a protective armor, absurd, perhaps, but inspiring her with security and confidence. Now she felt, she grumbled to herself, like a knight whose armor had been ripped off by the enemy, a turtle that had lost its shell, a bandit who had gone out to hold up a train and discovered he had left his “guns” at home. But—there was no denying it!—having deliberately let down the bars and made a bonfire of them, her vanity was acting like a hungry bear after a long winter’s sleep. It surged over her in singing waves as she regarded herself in the long mirror when arrayed for dinner in one of the soft clinging frocks that revealed arms and the upper part of a neck (Elsie scowled at models high in front and bare to the waist behind) that, however thin, were round and smooth and of the tint of old ivory. She smiled with lips very red and sharply curved, that had been reclaimed (under Elsie’s orders) from their perverse hard line; at her bright black eyes with their curved lids and lashes that under artificial light were reflected in the clear light olive and red of her cheeks; at the sweep of her eyebrows and the slender firmness of her throat. And then she would fall into a panic and feel an impulse to crawl under the bed. The morning following her first surrender to sheer femininity at the psyche mirror and its almost terrified reaction she hired a horse on the beach and spent two hours galloping over the sands. Here, at least, she could wear a manlike coat, and breeches, and ride astride. Of all this she never spoke to Elsie Brewster, and if the agile mind of her mentor darted close to the truth, that wise young woman was content with her large measure of success and, if only out of delicacy and loyalty, probed no further.