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278 But he catches my hand, flowers and all; and then I remember that I have not yet thanked him for his bouquet.

"Did I vex her," he says, looking down on my flushed face. "Was she such a vain little soul after all? Nell, Nell! after all the times I have exhorted you not to care about being pretty!"

"I am not vain," I say, turning my head away: "I never had anything to be vain of! But when one has been quite ugly for a very long while, and been told so every day of one's life, it is very disheartening, just as one begins to think one can look decent, for a person to say your dress looks nice, not you."

"There will be plenty of men to tell you that when you get downstairs, Nell," he says. "Can it make any difference to you what I think?"

"No, of course it does not!" I say, magnanimously, and ashamed of my temporary fit of vanity. "I could not expect you to say what you did not think, could I?"

"If I were to tell you all I thought," he says, looking down on me, "I should frighten you, perhaps, and you would not understand. Perhaps you will let me tell you some day."

"Let us go down," I say, with a sudden shrinking away from him; "the first dance is already over."

"Yes, it is over, and in the hall the people are pacing up and down, backwards and forwards, talking, laughing, flirting, in all the first gloss of their smartness; the men reduced to the smallest possible quantity of clothes, the women swelling forth in a lavish prodigality that mocks at "yards" and makes light of "breadths." Among them all I do not see any face I know; but a great many people nod and bow, and call acquaintance with Paul Vasher.

The haunting, matchless strains of "Blue Danube" come floating out to meet us as we enter the ball-room, and Paul puts his arm about my waist and we glide away, the first couple. After all, it is not difficult to dance when one has a perfect partner: per-