A girl who held herself straight like an Indian and at ease like an animal. Where there had been sallow cheeks and an unwholesome flabbiness, the blood now shone in living pink through the lucent skin. The eyes were twice as large as when, the year before, Darcy had set out upon her determined beauty quest; but that was because the sagging lines beneath had disappeared and the eyes themselves, deep gray against clear white, were softly brilliant with health. Above the broad, smooth, candid forehead, the hair, so deep brown as to be almost black, played the happy truant in little waves and whorls as delicate and errant as blown smoke. The chin was set and firm—that was Andy Dunne’s discipline of soul and body. Above it the mouth smiled as naturally and unconsciously as it had formerly drooped, and two little dimples had come to live in the comers. Beyond and above the sheer formative change in the girl, she was so pulsating, so palpitant with life that, even as she stood quiescent before Gloria’s appraising eyes, she seemed to sway to some impalpable rhythm of the blood. Yet Gloria was not wholly content. Hers was a wisdom that went deep. The re-created Darcy was a notable triumph, to be sure; looking upon her handiwork, Gloria found it good, nor did she doubt that others would find it good. But what of Darcy’s own bearing toward all these changes? Had she found herself? Until that question was settled in the affirmative, Gloria, re-creatrix, would not be satisfied. “Just the same I’d like to see Jack Remsen or any other man look at her as she is now once without looking twice,” Gloria challenged the masculine world on behalf of her candidate for troubles and honors in the Great Open Lists. Not men alone, but women as well, became addicted to that second look when Darcy passed their way in her new feathers. To her housemates the change, now forced upon their reluctant acceptance, was a matter of bewilderment if not of actual perturbation. Holcomb Lee, justified of his prophecies, exulted over the fact to such a point that Maud Raines felt it her womanly duty to fix a quarrel upon him. Undismayed, Holcomb took Darcy out to dinner. (“Never, never, never in the world would I have accepted, Gloria,” that dangerous young person assured her mentor, “if Maud Raines hadn’t been so catty and sneery about Holcomb’s drawing me.”) And Miss Raines hastily drowned her trumped-up grievance in a flood of alarmed tears. Even matter-of-fact Paul Wood, Helen’s betrothed, was impressed to the point of admiring comment. “That chrysalis has hatched for fair,” said he. “Hatched!” retorted Helen. “It didn’t hatch. It exploded!”