best ballet in Europe to the blush. Concha's skirts
swept Rezanov's feet, her little slippers twinkled
before his admiring eyes, and he lost no sinuous
turn or undulation of her beautiful figure; but she
never vouchsafed him a glance.

When the dance finished his host introduced him
to the prettiest of the girls and he paid them as many
compliments as their heads would stand. He even
took some trouble to talk to them, if only to fathom
the sources of their unlikeness to Concha Arguello.
He concluded that the gulf that separated her from
these charming, vivacious, shallow young girls was
not dug by education alone. Individualities were
rare enough in Europe; out here, in earthly, but
sparsely settled paradises, they must be rarer still;
but that one had wandered into the lovely shell of
Concha Arguello he no longer doubted. The fact
that it had developed haphazardly, with little or no
help from her sentience, and was still fluid and un-
certain, but multiplied her in interest and charm.
The women to whom he was accustomed knew
themselves, consequently were no riddle to a man of
his experience, but here he had an odd sense of hav-
ing entered into a compact in the dark with a girl
who might one day symbolize some high and im-
passioned ideal he had cherished in the days before
ideals had been cast aside with the negative virtues
that bred them.