Marvelling, trembling with timid and formless premonitions of rapture, she stood aglow in the revelation. She leaned closer to the mirror and spoke to it in a low voice, almost brokenly: “_My_, but you’re lovely—I might say it looks like you—of course she isn’t in your class!” Then, with new and strange stars in her eyes, this sudden Cinderella went out of her room and down the wide stairway, dazed but not afraid. The miracle had already touched her. Her uncle met her at the doorway of the drawing-room. “This is not little Elsie!” he said. “Why, good heavens, your father didn’t write us his Elsie had grown up into anything like _you_!” Immediately he took her upon his arm and turned to cross the room with her, going toward the dozen young people clustered about Cornelia. But Cornelia came running to her cousin. “You’re dazzling!” she whispered, and it was obvious that Cornelia’s friends had the same impression. They stopped talking abruptly as Elsie entered the room, and they remained in an eloquent state of silence until Cornelia began to make their names known to the visitor. Even after that, they talked in lowered voices until they went out to the dining-room. XXIV TRANSFIGURATION THEY were livelier at the table, but not nearly so noisy as Mamie Ford and Paul Reamer and their intimates would have been at a dinner party at home, Elsie thought; though this was but a hasty and vague comparison flitting through her mind. She was not able to think definitely about anything for a time: she was too dazzled by being dazzling. Her clearest thought was an inquiry: Was this she, herself, and, if she was indeed Elsie Hemingway, were these queer, kind, new people now about her quite sane? The tall young man with the long face who sat at her left talked to her as much as he could, being hampered by the circumstance that the fair-haired short young man on her right did his best to talk to her all the time, except when she spoke. Then both of them listened with deference; and so did a third young man directly across the table from her. More than that, she could not look about her without encountering the withdrawing glances of other guests of both sexes, though some of these glances, not from feminine orbs, were in no polite flurry to withdraw, but remained thoughtfully upon her as long as she looked their way. _Could_ it be Elsie Hemingway upon whom fond eyes of youth thus so sweetly lingered?