"I don't," she admitted, quite frankly. "We take it seriously, as we do most of our amusements, but it's a relic of barbarism. Once, when I was a very little girl, my father took me to see a Ute scalp-dance,--without the scalps, of course,--and--well, first impressions are apt to be lasting. I never see a ball-room in action without thinking of Fire-in-the-Snow and his capering braves." Jeffard smiled at the conceit, but he spoke to the truism. "I hope your first impressions of me won't be lasting," he ventured. "I think I was more than usually churlish last night." She glanced up quickly. "There should be no 'last night' for us," she averred. "Forgive me; you are quite right. But no matter what happens there always will be." Her gaze lost itself among the circling figures beyond the archway, and the truth of the assertion drove itself home with a twinge of something like regret. But when she turned to him again there was unashamed frankness in the clear gray eyes. "What poor minions the conventions have made us," she said. "Let us be primitive and admit that our acquaintance began last night. Does that help you?" "It will help me very much, if you will let me try to efface the first impression." "Does it need effacing?" "I think it must. I was moody and half desperate." He stopped, and she knew that he was waiting for some sign of encouragement. She looked away again, meaning not to give it. It is one of the little martyrdoms of sympathetic souls to invite confidences and thereby to suffer vicariously for the misdoings of the erring majority, and her burdens in this wise were many and heavy. Why should she go out of her way to add to them those of this man who ought to be abundantly able to carry his own? Thus the unspoken question, and the answer came close upon the heels of it. But for her own curiosity,--impertinence, she had begun to call it,--the occasion would never have arisen. "I am listening," she said, giving him his sign. Being permitted to speak freely, Jeffard found himself suddenly tongue-tied. "I don't know what I ought to say,--if, indeed, I ought to say anything at all," he began. "I think I gave you to understand that the world had been using me rather hardly." "And if you did?" A palpitant couple, free of the waltz, came up the stair, and Jeffard rose to make way. When the breathless ones perched themselves on the landing above, he went on, standing on the step below her and leaning against the baluster. "If I did, it was an implied untruth. It's a trite saying that the world is what we make it, and I am quite sure now that I have been making my part of it since I came to Denver. I'm not going to afflict you with the formula, but I shall feel better for having told you that I have torn it up and thrown it away." "And you will write out another?" "Beginning with to-morrow. I leave Denver in the morning." "You are not going back?" She said it with a little tang of deprecation in the words.