"Oh, hang it! that's different," and he stooped and gave her an awkward
kiss.

"I'm glad you know it's different," she said, with a laugh that had not a
trace of mockery in it; "and since you do, you'd better go along and do
your charity, and I'll stay at home, and try to be--different when you
come back."

And Jack went; with a little feeling of sheepishness that he would not
have acknowledged at the time, and he found himself in a company where he
was entirely at his ease. He admired the dancing of the blithe, graceful
girl, he applauded her as the rest did with hand-clapping and bravas, and
said it was ravishing. It all suited him perfectly. And somehow, in the
midst of it all, in the sensuous abandon of this electric-light
eccentricity at mid-day, he had a fleeting vision of something very
different, of a womanhood of another sort, and a flush came to his face
for a moment as he imagined Edith in a skirt dance under the gaze of this
sensation-loving society. But this was only for a moment. When he
congratulated Miss Tavish his admiration was entirely sincere; and the
girl, excited with her physical triumph, seemed to him as one emancipated
out of acquired prudishness into the Greek enjoyment of life. Miss
Tavish, who would not for the world have violated one of the social
conventions of her set, longed, as many women do, for the sort of freedom
and the sort of applause which belongs to women who succeed upon the
stage. Not that she would have forfeited her position by dancing at a
theatre for money; but; within limits, she craved the excitement, the
abandon, the admiration, that her grace and passion could win. This was
not at all the ambition which led the Egyptian queen Hatshepsu to assume
the dress of a man, but rather that more famous aspiration which led the