ive me the broody serious men with fierce looks and slow
smiles."

"Isn't Cleo in love with him?"

"Poor soul!" Mrs. Delarayne exclaimed. "She does her best. She would
take him, of course, simply because it will soon be an indignity for her
to remain single one minute longer. She would probably die of shame too
if someone else took Denis from her. But I think you know, that the man
who provokes Cleo's love will have to be a little bit different from
Denis."

CHAPTER II

On being dismissed from her mother's presence, Cleopatra did not go as
she had been commanded to her mirror in order to remove the little
shadow of down that adorned her upper lip. She retired instead to the
library, and ensconcing herself in one of the large leather easy chairs,
continued her reading of Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_.

Occasionally while she read she would raise her eyes from the printed
page to look at her unengaged hand as it rested on the arm of the chair
she occupied, and for some moments she would be wrapped in thought.

There had been no lack of competition for that hand since the day when,
at her coming-out dance, she had so eagerly extended it to Life for all
that Life had to offer. It was not that it had come back empty to her
side that made her sad. If occasionally she was moved by a little
bitterness about her brief existence, it was rather because the kind of
things with which her outstretched hand had been filled were so dismally
unsatisfying. She counted the men she had been compelled to refuse. They
numbered only two, but there were at least three others whom she had
never allowed to get as far as a proposal.

Again for the hundredth time she passed them in review. Had she acted
wisely? Were they so utterly impossible? Now, at the age of twenty-five,
her worldly wisdom answered, "Nay," but deep down in her breast a less
cultivated and more vigorous impulse answered most emphatically "Yea."

From early girlhood onwards Cleopatra had cherished very definite ideas
about the man of her taste. In this she was by no means exceptional. But
perhaps the circumstances that she had abided more steadfastly than most
by the pattern her imagination had originally limned distinguished her
from her more fickle sisters. The fault she found with the modern world
was that it did not offer you man whole or complete, but only in
fragments. To be quite plain, it offered you, from the athlete to the
poet, a series of iso