"... so then when she came to me," Nina was recounting the
reception of some celebrity at school, "of course I was awfully
shy; you know me!" She was suddenly diverted. "But I'm not as shy
as I used to be, am I, Miss Harriet?" she asked, confidingly.

"Not nearly!" Harriet made herself say, encouragingly.

"Well, then," Nina resumed, "when she came to me I don't know what
I said--I just said something or other--I can't for the life of me
remember what it was! Probably I just said that I had seen her in
her last three plays or something like that, anyway--anyway, she
said to Miss King that she had noticed me, and she said, 'It's an
aristocratic face!' Amy Hawkes told me, for a trade last. The
girls were wild--they were all so crazy to have her notice them,
you know, and I thought--I thought of course she'd speak of Lucia
or Ethel Benedict or one of those prettier girls; although," said
Nina, with her little air of conscientiousness, "Ethel didn't look
a bit pretty that day. Sometimes she does; sometimes she looks
perfectly lovely! But that day she looked sort of colourless.
'Aristocratic'!" Nina laughed softly. "Well, I'd rather look
aristocratic than be the prettiest girl in the world, wouldn't
you?"

Harriet glanced at her with something like pity. This was Nina in
her before-the-party mood. Her confidence and complacency would
all begin to ooze away from her, presently, and the words that
came so readily to Harriet would refuse to flow at all to any one
else. She would come home saying that she hated parties because
people were all so shallow and uninteresting, and that she
couldn't help what her friends said of her, she just wouldn't