ng-room by a wood fire that
crackled in the grate; crackled most decorously, be it added, for
Mrs. De Peyster's fire would no more have forgotten itself and shown
a boisterous enthusiasm than would one of her admirably trained
servants. Beside a small steel safe, whose outer shell of exquisite
cabinet-work transformed that fortress against burglarious desire into
an article of furniture that harmonized with the comfortable elegance
of a lady's boudoir, sat Mrs. De Peyster herself--she was born a De
Peyster--carefully transferring her jewels from the trays of the safe
to leathern cases. She looked quite as Mrs. De Peyster should have
looked: with an aura of high dignity that a sixty-year-old dowager of
the first water could not surpass, yet with a freshness of person that
(had it not been for her dignity) might have made her early forties
seem a blossomy thirty-five.

Before the well-bred fire sat a lady whose tears had long since
dried that she had shed when she had bid good-bye to thirty. She
was--begging the lady's pardon--a trifle spare, and a trifle pale,
and though in a manner well enough dressed her clothes had an air
of bewilderment, of general irresolution, as though each article was
uncertain in its mind as to whether it purposed to remain where it had
been put, or casually wander away on blind and timorous adventures.

A dozen years before, Mrs. De Peyster, then in the fifth year of her
widowhood, had graciously undertaken to manage and underwrite the
debut of her second cousin (not of the main line, be it said) and had
tried to discharge her duty in the important matter of securing her
a husband. But her efforts had been futile, and to say that Mrs. De
Peyster had not succeeded was to admit that poor Olivetta Harmon
was indeed a failure. She had lacked the fortune to attract the
conservative investor who is looking for a sound business proposition
in her he promises to support; she had lacked the good looks to lure
on the lover who throws himself romantically away upon a penniless
pretty face; and she had not been clever enough to attract the man
so irrationally bold as to set sail upon the sea of matrimony with a
woman of brains. And so, her brief summer at an end, she had receded
to those remote and undiscovered shores on which dwell the poor
relations of the Four Hundred; whereon she had lived respectably, as
a lady (for that she should ever appear a lady was due the position
of Mrs. De Peyster), upon an