of the battle which was waged night after night between raw nature
and good manners. It was extraordinary to him how constantly
manners prevailed. There were, however, exceptions.

For instance. On the first evening of this particular visit he
found the rooms hot, and sauntered out into the little
semicircular garden at the back. He sat there for half an hour
under a flawless sky of stars watching the people come and go in
the light of the electric lamps, and appreciating the gowns and
jewels of the women with the eye of a connoisseur; and then into
this starlit quiet there came suddenly a flash of vivid life. A
girl in a soft, clinging frock of white satin darted swiftly from
the rooms and flung herself nervously upon a bench. She could not,
to Ricardo's thinking, be more than twenty years of age. She was
certainly quite young. The supple slenderness of her figure proved
it, and he had moreover caught a glimpse, as she rushed out, of a
fresh and very pretty face; but he had lost sight of it now. For
the girl wore a big black satin hat with a broad brim, from which
a couple of white ostrich feathers curved over at the back, and in
the shadow of that hat her face was masked. All that he could see
was a pair of long diamond eardrops, which sparkled and trembled
as she moved her head--and that she did constantly. Now she stared
moodily at the ground; now she flung herself back; then she
twisted nervously to the right, and then a moment afterwards to
the left; and then again she stared in front of her, swinging a
satin slipper backwards and forwards against the pavement with the
petulance of a child. All her movements were spasmodic; she was on
the verge of hysteria. Ricardo was expecting her to burst into
tears, when she sprang up and as swiftly as she had come she
hurried back into the rooms. "Summer lightning," thought Mr.