... That time--she was huddled on the floor again in front of the fire, one arm resting on the armchair’s seat--that time a year ago, when Nina gave a party; and she, with hair recently washed to fall in a loose shimmering cloud down her back, and wearing a new bluish-grey party-frock, graceful folds of pale soft satin, was so flushed and stimulated with the sudden achievement of real prettiness that she behaved as though she were a delicately intoxicated fairy--and laughed and talked as if it were _her_ party, and gave orders, and tossed herself about, and was imperious, and a flirt, and a queen ... until Nina said to her, when everybody had gone: “What _was_ the matter with you, kid? Everybody was laughing at you; and that good-looking man whom Bobbie Mathers brought, told Bobbie you ran after him till he was afraid to stay. How could you make such a fool of yourself?” The room had seen her through, then; had mercifully hidden her shame and her stung vanity and her hot disgust with herself. Supposing, though, that same evening of blunder were still to come, and no place for her to be alone in after Nina had said: “Everybody was laughing at you....” For a moment the memory was vivid again, and Ursula clenched her hands against the humiliation. Ambitious to be neither rich nor a genius, and scornful of sentimental slush, she had always hoped for fame as a hostess, a quaintly witty, worldly yet serene personality, who was an influence in a shining spacious atmosphere, where only supple minds and graceful figures were suffered. Her idea of the perfect setting in which to be serene and witty was acres of parquet floor, and one little twisty gold and brocade sofa, and a sort of mellow amber light in it, and miniatures, and low, cool voices, and long, cool necks. And when she tried--only just tried--to realize her conception of a Social Personality, Nina said.... The good-looking man whom Bobbie Mathers brought, did not figure distinctly in her aftermath of rage and shame. He was merely an indecipherable part of it. Men ... they didn’t count yet. Sometimes Ursula’s imagination played games in which, queerly, she forsook her own part, and became a chivalrous ardent squire to one Ursula, touched up and ennobled, but in the main essentials herself. Narcissus and Narcissa.... It was good to be a male, a swashbuckler; and it seemed quite natural, as such, to fall in love with the demure grey-eyed Ursula.... “But you know your eyes aren’t grey at all, they’ve got green and brown and blue, all mixed in. Once, in a storm off Lagos, I saw the hollow of the waves just that colour a second before they shattered over the deck.... God, I’d like to have had you there with me!”