OPHESIES

"Now, this is just too sweet of you, Niti, to come so soon after we got
here. In five minutes more I should have written you a note, asking you
and the Professor to come and take lunch with us to-morrow, and here
you've anticipated me, so we have the pleasure of seeing you all the
sooner."

These were the words with which Miss Brenda van Huysman greeted Nitocris
as she entered the drawing-room of the suite of apartments which formed
her home for the time being in London. I say her home advisedly,
because, although her father and mother also occupied it, she was
virtually, if not nominally, mistress undisputed of the splendid
camping-place.

She was an almost perfect type of the highly developed, highly educated
American girl of to-day, a marvellous compound of intense energy and
languorous grace. She had done as brilliantly at Vassar as Nitocris had
done at Girton and London, and she had also rowed stroke in the Ladies'
Eight, and was champion fencer of the College. Yet as far as her
physical presence was concerned, she was just a "Gibson Girl" of the
daintiest type--fair-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired--her hair had a
darker gleam of bronze in it in certain lights--exquisitely moulded
features which seemed capable of every sort of expression within a few
changing moments, and a poise of head and carriage of body which only
perfect health and the most scientific physical training can produce. In
a word, she was one of those miraculous developments of femininity which
Nature seems to have made a speciality for the particular benefit of the
younger branch of the Anglo-Saxon race. As for her dress--well, the
shortest and best way to describe that is to say that it exactly suited
her.

As she spoke, and their hands met, Mrs van Huysman got up and came
towards them, saying:

"Good afternoon, Miss Marmion. We were real glad to get your 'phone, and
it's good to see you again. How's the Professor? Too busy to come with
you, I suppose, as usual. We see he's going to lecture before the Royal
Society on the tenth, and I reckon we shall all be there to listen to
him. I shouldn't wonder but there'll be trouble as usual between him and
my husband. It seems a pity that two such clever men should waste so
much time in scrapping over these scientific things, which don't seem to
matter half a cent, anyhow."

"Oh, I don't know," laughed Nitocris, as they shook hands. "You see, Mrs
van Huysman, _they_ do think it matt