y ultimately achieve her high
ambition.

Just why Mrs. Hawley-Crowles should have seen in Carmen a means of
reaching a woman of the stamp of the Beaubien, and through her the
leader of the most exclusive social set in the metropolis, is
difficult to say. But thus does the human mind often seek to further
its own dubious aims through guileless innocence and trust. Perhaps
Mrs. Hawley-Crowles had likewise a slight trace of that clairvoyance
of wisdom which so characterized the girl. But with this difference,
that she knew not why she was led to adopt certain means; while
Carmen, penetrating externals, consciously sought to turn those who
would employ her into channels for the expression of her own dominant
thought. Be that as it may, the Beaubien was now the stone before the
door of their hope, and Carmen the lever by which these calculating
women intended it should be moved.

"The Beaubien, my dear," explained Mrs. Hawley-Crowles to her
inquisitive sister, whose life had been lived almost entirely away
from New York, "is J. Wilton Ames's very particular friend, of long
standing. As I told you, I have recently been going through my late
unpleasant husband's effects, and have unearthed letters and memoranda
which throw floods of light upon Jim's early indiscretions and his
association with both the Beaubien and Ames. Jim once told me, in a
burst of alcoholic confidence, that she had saved him from J. Wilton's
clutches in the dim past, and for that he owed her endless gratitude,
as well as for never permitting him to darken her door again. Now I
have never met the Beaubien. Few women have. But I dare say she knows
all about us. However, the point that concerns us now is this: she has
a hold on Ames, and, unless rumor is wide of the truth, when she hints
to him that his wife's dinner list or yachting party seems incomplete
without such or such a name, why, the list is immediately revised."

The position which the Beaubien held was, if Madam On-dit was not to
be wholly discredited, to say the least, unique. It was not as social
dictator that she posed, for in a great cosmopolitan city where polite
society is infinitely complex in its make-up such a position can
scarcely be said to exist. It was rather as an influence that she was
felt, an influence never seen, but powerful, subtle, and wholly
inexplicable, working now through this channel, now through that, and
effecting changes in the social complexion of conservative New