ed at Susy's bosom as she
sat in her tapestried and vaulted bedroom, brushing her hair before a
tarnished mirror.

"I thought I liked grandeur; but this place is really out of scale," she
mused, watching the reflection of a pale hand move back and forward
in the dim recesses of the mirror. "And yet," she continued, "Ellie
Vanderlyn's hardly half an inch taller than I am; and she certainly
isn't a bit more dignified.... I wonder if it's because I feel so
horribly small to-night that the place seems so horribly big."

She loved luxury: splendid things always made her feel handsome and
high ceilings arrogant; she did not remember having ever before been
oppressed by the evidences of wealth.

She laid down the brush and leaned her chin on her clasped hands....
Even now she could not understand what had made her take the cigars.
She had always been alive to the value of her inherited scruples: her
reasoned opinions were unusually free, but with regard to the things
one couldn't reason about she was oddly tenacious. And yet she had taken
Streffy's cigars! She had taken them--yes, that was the point--she
had taken them for Nick, because the desire to please him, to make
the smallest details of his life easy and agreeable and luxurious,
had become her absorbing preoccupation. She had committed, for him,
precisely the kind of little baseness she would most have scorned to
commit for herself; and, since he hadn't instantly felt the difference,
she would never be able to explain it to him.

She stood up with a sigh, shook out her loosened hair, and glanced
around the great frescoed room. The maid-servant had said something
about the Signora's having left a letter for her; and there it lay on
the writing-table, with her mail and Nick's; a thick envelope addressed
in Ellie's childish scrawl, with a glaring "Private" dashed across the
corner.

"What on earth can she have to say, when she hates writing so," Susy
mused.

She broke open the envelope, and four or five stamped and sealed letters
fell from it. All were addressed, in Ellie's hand, to Nelson Vanderlyn
Esqre; and in the corner of each was faintly pencilled a number and a
date: one, two, three, four--with a week's interval between the dates.

"Goodness--" gasped Susy, understanding.

She had dropped into an armchair near the table, and for a long time
she sat staring at the numbered letters. A sheet of paper covered with
Ellie's writing had fluttered out among them,