oman with her first lover, and something of the timidity, this
tantalizing preliminary to fruition. How could she ever have believed
that her mind was old? She turned her imagination away from that lodge
in the Dolomites, and believed it was because the present with its
happiness and its excitements sufficed her.

Moreover, she was having one novel experience that afforded her much
diversion. The newspapers were full of her. It took exactly five days
after Mrs. Oglethorpe's luncheon for the story she had told there to
filter down to Park Row, and although she would not consent to be
interviewed, there were double-page stories in the Sunday issues,
embellished with snapshots and a photograph of the Mary Ogden of the
eighties: a photographer who had had the honor to "take" her was still
in existence and exhumed the plates.

Doctors, biologists, endocrinologists, were interviewed. Civil war
threatened: the medical fraternity, upheld by a few doubting Thomases
among the more abstract followers of the science, on one side of the
field, by far the greater number of those who peer into the human
mechanism with mere scientific acumen on the other. Doctors,
notoriously as conservative as kings and as jealous as opera singers,
found themselves threatened with the loss of elderly patients whose
steady degeneration was a source of respectable income. When it was
discovered that New York actually held a practicing physician who had
studied with the great endocrinologists of Vienna, the street in front
of his house looked as if some ambitious hostess were holding a
continual reception.

Finally Madame Zattiany consented to give a brief statement to the
press through her lawyers. It was as impersonal as water, but
technical enough to satisfy the _Medical Journal_. At the theatre and
opera people waited in solid phalanxes to see her pass. Her utter
immobility on these occasions but heightened the feverish interest.

Women of thirty, dreaming of becoming flappers overnight, and
formidable rivals, with the subtlety of experience behind the mask of
seventeen, were desolated to learn that they must submit to the claws
and teeth of Time until they had reached the last mile-post of their
maturity. Beauty doctors gnashed their teeth, and plastic surgeons
looked forward to the day when they must play upon some other form of
human credulity. As a subject for the press it rivalled strikes,
prohibition, German reparations, Lenin,