But you are too good to him, he is one of the very worst of my pratiques; and you are as cruel to me in refusing to deign to accept my trooper's worthless bagatelles at my hands." She bent her superb head silently, whether in acquiescence or rejection he could not well resolve with himself, and turned to the staff officers, among them the heir of a princely semi-royal French House, who surrounded her, and sorely begrudged the moments she had given to those miniature carvings and the private soldier who had wrought them.

She was no coquette; she was of too imperial a nature, had too lofty a pride, and was too difficult to charm or to enchain; but those meditative, brilliant, serene eyes had a terrible gift of awakening without ever seeking love, and of drawing without ever recompensing homage.
Crouched down among her rose-hued covert, Cigarette had watched and heard; her teeth set tightly, her breath coming and going swiftly, her hand clinched close on the butts of her pistols; fiery curses, with all the infinite variety in cursing of a barrack repertoire, chasing one another in hot, fast mutterings of those bright lips, that should have known nothing except a child's careless and innocent song.
She had never looked at a beautiful, high-born woman before, holding them in gay, satirical disdain as mere butterflies who could not prime a revolver and fire it off to save their own lives, if ever such need arose.

But now she studied one through all the fine, quickened, unerring instincts of jealousy; and there is no instinct in the world that gives such thorough appreciation of the very rival it reviles.

She saw the courtly negligence, the regal grace, the fair, brilliant loveliness, the delicious, serene languor, of a pure aristocrate for the very first time to note them, and they made her heart sick with a new and deadly sense; they moved her much as the white, delicate carvings of the lotus-lilies had done; they, like the carvings, showed her all she had missed.

She dropped her head suddenly like a wounded bird, and the racy, vindictive camp oaths died off her lips.