With that I asked her a question that for the moment surprised even her. I asked it perfectly seriously, seeking not only the unblinkered eye, but also the one within its deep ambush of white hat-brim. "Julia, are you yourself in every respect the same woman to-day that you were before we had our talk yesterday?" She turned her head to watch the tennis-players on the sands below, the swallow-divers from the tall stage. She turned it further, and her gaze passed from the clustered villas across the bay to the awnings of the hotel, the sunny white of the balustrade, the waiter who approached in answer to my summons. Then she looked at me. "I know what you mean. Not just this hat and a touch of lipstick and these"--she showed her arms. "I'm the same, of course, but I suppose I'm different too. And I'm going to be different. Ask Jennie. She knows. Any woman would know--just by dancing with somebody and never saying a word, George. One keeps one's eyes open and--adapts oneself. Jennie knows all about it. Ask her." And the flashing, daring, confident smile, which had vanished for a moment, reappeared. It was her request for a vermouth that had prompted my sudden question. All at once I had found myself wondering who the man was, in Buckinghamshire apparently, who shared with myself the privilege of having been refused by her. Not that I was interested in his identity; but from him, or from the man who had been attentive to her on the boat, or from somebody else, or from a whole series of men for all I knew, she had--the slang is required--"picked up a thing or two." It was a far cry from that first cocktail in the Piccadilly to this hat, this revelation of arms, these conscious coquetries with bathing-wraps and auction with Alec Aird. Mind you, I knew as surely as I sat opposite to her that not one of these fellow-unfortunates of mine had had a scrap more from her than I had had myself. They had been dismissed without compunction the moment she had had what she required of them. On Derry and on Derry alone her dark eyes were unchangingly set. No trifling, no flirtation by the way, any more than to the rehearsal is given the unstinted kiss of the passionate performance. Therefore in this she was single and unchanged. But she had seen Derry that morning, and that excited bombardment of electrons that seemed to emanate from him and to alter the nature of everyone who came into contact with him had worked an alteration in her. She might call it "adapting herself," but it was essentially more than that. For she had seen Jennie too, knew of their love, and had instantly re-assembled and re-marshalled all the forces at her disposal. Whatever might be her broadside of hat, arms and the rest, swiftly and craftily she had seen that there was one thing she could not ape--the simplicity of seventeen. Contest on that ground meant defeat in advance. In this, its vivid opposite, lay her desperate chance.