“By the way, I was quite wrong about Miss Brown’s age, she turns out to be only eighteen! And when she talks I can quite believe it, not that she is at all silly or giggly--she still deliciously represses the giggly part--but because she prefaces a good many of her remarks with an “Oh!” which sounds exactly as though she had just eaten a piece of Turkish Delight and had liked it rather a lot. I met her at a dance given at the hotel the other night. A _Gala Bal_, they called it. A _Soirée de Gala_. Well, I wandered into the _Gala Bal_, and saw her sitting in a far corner with her mother, looking very absent-minded, I thought; and well she might, for the difference between a _Gala Bal_ and a common-or-garden _Bal_ is that five hundred people are shoved on to a floor made to hold fifty; and so I sidled across the floor, made my bow and formed words indicative of a pressing desire to dance with her, all of which went quite well. It went even better, when, just as we were about to take the floor, I asked her ‘whether she preferred to be held by the spine or the liver?’ at which she suddenly gave such a laugh that various Frenchwomen looked for the first time away from her clothes to her face, which was a very agreeable contrast to theirs, they having used powder and what-nots to excess in honour of the _Gala Bal_. “I suppose you know what a French hotel orchestra is like at playing dance music? It is very good as an orchestra over meals, very classical and all that, but what is the use of a fox-trot without saxophones and drums and little tiddley-bits here and there? One has to be a little mad to dance a fox-trot, a little mad or a little drunk, but one can’t be a little mad to the polite strains of an orchestra lead by a _chef d’orchestre_, which every now and then dries up completely to give the first violin a chance to be a first violin. “So we gave up dancing after a while--we had to, anyhow, for the _Gala Balists_ began dancing in open formation--and I lured her out on to the terrace with a promise of a lemon-squash: which, however, turned out to be an orangeade--two straws and a lump of ice, you know--but she seemed to enjoy it none the less for that. Did she like orangeade? Oh, yes, she liked orangeade frightfully. Then what to say? I asked her if she liked dancing. “‘Oh, yes!’ she said very softly. ‘Why, what else is there!’ “Well, when one comes to think of it, there doesn’t really seem to be very much else, and so that was that. Later on, however, there turned out to be skiing. Oh, yes, she liked skiing. Dancing and skiing.... And, somehow or other, she asked me what I was, and I said ‘Nothing,’ which is a good deal truer than I like to think. But she said in her soft, brown way: ‘Oh, how splendid! for I’m nothing, too, so we can be nothing together.’ That sounded charming at the time, though now I have written it down there looks something the matter with it. But that girl is quite beyond me.