adys, who had no lack of confidence in her
power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness
then and when she met him at other houses.

"He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever
she tried to discuss him did not discourage her. "But if he ever does
care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps
things before him in his career. Don't you think so?"

"Yes," said Pauline.

She had now lingered at Saint X two months beyond the time she
originally set. She told herself she had reached the limit of
endurance, that she must fly from the spectacle of Gladys' growing
intimacy with Scarborough; she told Gladys it was impossible for her
longer to neglect the new house in Fifth Avenue. With an effort she
added: "You'd rather stay on here, wouldn't you?"

"I detest New York," replied Gladys. "And I've never enjoyed myself in
my whole life as I'm enjoying it here."

So she went East alone, went direct to Dawn Hill, their country place
at Manhasset, Long Island, which Dumont never visited. She invited
Leonora Fanshaw down to stand between her thoughts and herself. Only
the society of a human being, one who was light-hearted and amusing,
could tide her back to any sort of peace in the old life--her books and
her dogs, her horseback and her drawing and her gardening. A life so
full of events, so empty of event. It left her hardly time for proper
sleep, yet it had not a single one of those vivid threads of intense
and continuous interest--and one of them is enough to make bright the
dullest pattern that issues from the Loom.

In her "splendor" her nearest approach to an intimacy had been with
Leonora.

She had no illusions about the company she was keeping in the East. To
her these "friends" seemed in no proper sense either her friends or one
another's. Drawn together from all parts of America, indeed of the
world, by the magnetism of millions, they had known one another not at
all or only slightly in the period of life when thorough friendships
are made; even where they had been associates as children, the
association had rarely been of the kind that creates friendship's
democratic intimacy. They had no common traditions, no real
class-feeling, no common enthusiasms--unless the passion for keeping
rich, for getting richer, for enjoying and displaying riches, could be
called enthusiasm. They were mere intimate acquaintances, making small
preten