that you should sympathize with him about the latest painter, the latest poet, the latest composer. He did not really care whether you sympathized or not; but if you didn’t, you were negligible for his purposes. She saw that he had already found Giles negligible; and she wondered why he did not put her into the same category. Did he imagine that she possessed and withheld even fresher appraisals? It was not so and she did not pretend it, looking at him with her quiet smile and softly shaking her head now and then. She had never thought of herself as a person whose appraisals mattered; she had thought of herself as too much of a child. But perhaps it was because Jerry found her beautiful that he was indifferent to her indifference. After dinner they danced. Many young people arrived and the tall red Chinese screens in the hall were put back. There was a piano and two violins and one of the young men who played had such a gloomy face, like a French or Italian face—like Jules’ face—that Alix wished she could talk to him and ask him if he were a foreigner. But there was no time for talk. She and Jerry found that their steps went beautifully together. She danced with him; many times; and with other young men; and Jerry helped her to evade Mr. Fulham who, seeing how many partners she had, wished to be one of them. But with Jerry it was best of all, and how much more important it was to have steps that chimed than to care about the same books and pictures! It seemed to-night, among the flowers, and lights, and music, the most important of all things; though once or twice, when she found Giles’s eyes again, she knew that the sense of ecstasy on which she floated must have the evanescence of a mirage. Dear Giles. She made him dance with her and they laughed together as they went slowly round the hall, for Giles did not dance well. Afterwards she saw that he talked with Lady Mary and with Mr. Hamble. He did not go into the mirage. He only looked on at it. When Alix fell asleep that night in the firelight, she dreamed that a cool crystal stream flowed round her and that she floated on its silver surfaces. Golden lights lay like a chain of little suns along its margin and her hands, softly moving in the current, felt rosy petals pass between their fingers. The throb of dance-music, sweet, reckless, imbecile, beat in her blood, and in her ears the sound of Jerry’s voice saying: “_Beautiful_, isn’t it?” And Giles’s eyes were there watching her. In her dream she wanted to tell Giles that she had nothing to conceal. She tried to tell him, but she felt the silver stream flowing over her lips and making them dumb, though they smiled. If Giles looked at her like that she might begin to blush. But even so she did not want him gone. While he was there she was so safe. CHAPTER V