Then there swept into the room two of the strangest and most delightful persons Thurley had ever seen. Collin Hedley came first, a fair-haired, boyish man with eyes so joyous and brilliant one could not look at them for long, and the bristly head of the plebeian with deep incurvation of the temples. He was most carelessly dressed, but no one would have noticed that as long as his eyes smiled; he had a mad Van Dyke beard and a lovable yet combative mouth which might or might not prophesy many things. But it was Polly Harris who captivated Thurley’s heart and made her forget her shyness. Polly had the fashion of bombarding one’s self-consciousness. She could have changed the saying, “A cat may look at a king” to “a cat may order a king.” Even Bliss Hobart lost dignity in her presence. “Polly can teach you to write _vers libre_ on your cuff and tell a Chicago art patron from a Pittsburg coal dealer at a distance of fifty yards,” was Hobart’s universal recommendation. But Polly Harris could do a great deal more. She reminded one, although her age was less than Ernestine’s, of October sunshine, partly because she was a tiny, wood-brown thing, an oddity, a fact she well knew, flat-chested as a boy, with tanned skin, eyes like topazes, if she were happy, and her brown hair bobbed like a child’s and fastened with a ridiculous velvet bow. Her dresses were inevitably the same—since her income was likewise—Polly’s regimentals, they called them, brown corduroy for winter, made in semi-smock, semi-Eton-jacket style with an abbreviated skirt and stout little boots laced as if for a walking tour. In the summer Polly appeared in brown cotton made in similar fashion and when she was dragged to some formal affair she would be induced to wear her “heirloom,” a brocaded brown velvet which Ernestine had brought from Paris. Polly was just Polly with her crisp little voice, a heart of gold and a tongue which could be sharp as a battle lance or as tender as pink rosebuds. “The only sprite in captivity,” the family dubbed her, pitying her impossible aim—to write grand opera—and never hinting what tragedy lay before her when the tanned face would wrinkle and the bobbed hair turn gray. It was as probable that Polly Harris could write a grand opera as that Betsey Pilrig could lead the Russian ballet—but Polly, as so often happens in the case of “captured sprites,” saw none of the absurdity encasing her ambitions.