For Athalie that first year of new interests and of unfamiliar
successes passed more rapidly than had any single month ever before
passed in her life since the strenuous and ragged days of childhood.

It was a year of novelty, of excitement, of self-development, and the
development of interests as new as they had been unsuspected.

Like a gaily illuminated pageant the processional passed before her
with its constantly changing surroundings, new faces, new voices, new
ideas, new motives.

And the new faces were to be scanned and understood, the new voices
listened to intently, the new ideas analysed, the new motives detected
and dissected.

In drawing-rooms, in ballrooms, in boudoirs, new scenes constantly
presented themselves; one house was never like the next, one hostess
never resembled another; wealth itself was presented to her under
innumerable aspects ranging all the way from that false modesty and
smugness known as meekness, to fevered pretence, arrogance, and noisy
aggressiveness.

Wonderful school for a girl to learn in!--the gilded halls of which
were eternally vexed and swept by the winds and whirlwinds of every
human passion.

For here, under her still, clear scrutiny, was huddled humanity
itself, unconsciously bent on self-revelation. And Athalie's very
presence amid assemblies ever shifting, ever renewed, was educating
her eyes and ears and intellect to an insight and a comprehension she
had never dreamed of.

In some the supreme necessity for self-ventilation interested her; in
others, secretiveness hermetically sealed fascinated her. Motives
interested or disinterested, sordid or noble; desires, aspirations,
hopes, perplexities,--whatever a glance, a word, an attitude, a
silence, suggested to her, fixed her attention, excited her
intelligence to curiosity, and focussed her interest to a mental
concentration.