She had never realized the difference betwixt them and herself, save in so far as she thought them useless butterflies, worth nothing at all, and laughed as she triumphantly remembered how she could shoot a man and break in a colt.
Now, for the first time, the sight of one of those aristocrats smote her with a keen, hot sting of heart-burning jealousy.

Now, for the fist time, the little Friend of the Flag looked at all the nameless graces of rank with an envy that her sunny, gladsome, generous nature had never before been touched with--with a sudden perception, quick as thought, bitter as gall, wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what this womanhood, that he had said she herself had lost, might be in its highest and purest shape.
"If those are the women that he knew before he came here, I do not wonder that he never cared to watch even my bamboula," was the latent, unacknowledged thought that was so cruel to her: the consciousness--which forced itself in on her, while her eyes jealously followed the perfect grace of the one in whom instinct had found her rival--that, while she had been so proud of her recklessness, and her devilry, and her trooper's slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, she had only been something very worthless, something very lightly held by those who liked her for a ribald jest, and a dance, and a Spahis' supper of headlong riot and drunken mirth.
The mood did not last.

She was too brave, too fiery, too dauntless, too untamed.

The dusky, angry flush upon her face grew deeper, and the passion gathered more stormily in her eyes, while she felt the pistol butts in her sash, and laughed low to herself, where she lay stretched under her flowery nest.
"Bah! she would faint, I dare say, at the mere sight of these," she thought, with her old disdain, "and would stand fire no more than a gazelle! They are only made for summer-day weather, those dainty, gorgeous, silver pheasants.

A breath of war, a touch of tempest, would soon beat them down--crash!--with all their proud crests drooping!" Like many another Cigarette underrated what she had no knowledge of, and depreciated an antagonist the measure of whose fence she had no power to gauge.
Crouched there among the rhododendrons, she lay as still as a mouse, moving nearer and nearer, though none would have told that so much as a lizard even stirred under the blossoms, until her ear, quick and unerring as an Indian's, could detect the sense of the words spoken by that group, which so aroused all the hot ire of her warrior's soul and her democrat's impatience.