They laughed a little; her fingers, which had tightened on his arm, relaxed; her hand fell away, and she straightened up, sitting Turk fashion, and smoothing her hair which contact with the pillows had disarranged so that it threatened to come tumbling over eyes and cheeks.

“Oh, hair, hair!” she murmured, “you’re Nina’s despair and my endless punishment.  I’d twist and pin you tight if I dared—­some day I will, too. . . .  What are you looking at so curiously, Captain Selwyn?  My mop?”

“It’s about the most stunningly beautiful thing I ever saw,” he said, still curious.

She nodded gaily, both hands still busy with the lustrous strands.  “It is nice; but I never supposed you noticed it.  It falls to my waist; I’ll show it to you some time. . . .  But I had no idea you noticed such things,” she repeated, as though to herself.

“Oh, I’m apt to notice all sorts of things,” he said, looking so provokingly wise that she dropped her hair and clapped both hands over her eyes.

“Now,” she said, “if you are so observing, you’ll know the colour of my eyes.  What are they?”

“Blue—­with a sort of violet tint,” he said promptly.

She laughed and lowered her hands.

“All that personal attention paid to me!” she exclaimed.  “You are turning my head, Captain Selwyn.  Besides, you are astonishing me, because you never seem to know what women wear or what they resemble when I ask you to describe the girls with whom you have been dining or dancing.”

It was a new note in their cordial intimacy—­this nascent intrusion of the personal.  To her it merely meant his very charming recognition of her maturity—­she was fast becoming a woman like other women, to be looked at and remembered as an individual, and no longer classed vaguely as one among hundreds of the newly emerged whose soft, unexpanded personalities all resembled one another.

For some time, now, she had cherished this tiny grudge in her heart—­that he had never seemed to notice anything in particular about her except when he tried to be agreeable concerning some new gown.  The contrast had become the sharper, too, since she had awakened to the admiration of other men.  And the awakening was only a half-convinced happiness mingled with shy surprise that the wise world should really deem her so lovely.

“A red-headed girl,” she said teasingly; “I thought you had better taste than—­than—­”

“Than to think you a raving beauty?”

“Oh,” she said, “you don’t think that!”

As a matter of fact he himself had become aware of it so suddenly that he had no time to think very much about it.  It was rather strange, too, that he had not always been aware of it; or was it partly the mellow light from the lamp tinting her till she glowed and shimmered like a young sorceress, sitting so straight there in her turquoise silk and misty lace?

Delicate luminous shadow banded her eyes; her hair, partly in shadow, too, became a sombre mystery in rose-gold.