cerned than Givre with
the momentous question of "what people did"; it was only the type of
deed investigated that was different. Mr. Leath collected his social
instances with the same seriousness and patience as his snuff-boxes.
He exacted a rigid conformity to his rules of non-conformity and his
scepticism had the absolute accent of a dogma. He even cherished certain
exceptions to his rules as the book-collector prizes a "defective" first
edition. The Protestant church-going of Anna's parents had provoked
his gentle sarcasm; but he prided himself on his mother's devoutness,
because Madame de Chantelle, in embracing her second husband's creed,
had become part of a society which still observes the outward rites of
piety.

Anna, in fact, had discovered in her amiable and elegant mother-in-law
an unexpected embodiment of the West Fifty-fifth Street ideal. Mrs.
Summers and Madame de Chantelle, however strongly they would have
disagreed as to the authorized source of Christian dogma, would have
found themselves completely in accord on all the momentous minutiae of
drawing-room conduct; yet Mr. Leath treated his mother's foibles with a
respect which Anna's experience of him forbade her to attribute wholly
to filial affection.

In the early days, when she was still questioning the Sphinx instead of
trying to find an answer to it, she ventured to tax her husband with his
inconsistency.

"You say your mother won't like it if I call on that amusing little
woman who came here the other day, and was let in by mistake; but
Madame de Chantelle tells me she lives with her husband, and when mother
refused to visit Kitty Mayne you said----"

Mr. Leath's smile arrested her. "My dear child, I don't pretend to apply
the principles of logic to my poor mother's prejudices."

"But if you admit that they ARE prejudices----?"

"There are prejudices and prejudices. My mother, of course, got hers
from Monsieur de Chantelle, and they seem to me as much in their place
in this house as the pot-pourri in your hawthorn jar. They preserve a
social tradition of which I should be sorry to lose the least perfume.
Of course I don't expect you, just at first, to feel the difference, to
see the nuance. In the case of little Madame de Vireville, for instance:
you point out that she's still under her husband's roof. Very true; and
if she were merely a Paris acquaintance--especially if you had met her,
as one still might, in the RIGHT KIND of house in P