--among the sons and daughters of the people who are my
friends. They tell me that she has temperament--whatever that may be.
I'm sure I never found out, except that the best thing to do with people
who have it is to let them alone and pray for them. When we go abroad
I like the Ritz and Claridge's and that new hotel in Rome. I see my
friends there. Victoria, if you please, likes the little hotels in
the narrow streets where you see nobody, and where you are most
uncomfortable." (Miss Oliver, it's time for those seven drops.) "As I
was saying, Victoria's enigmatical hopeless, although a French comtesse
who wouldn't look at anybody at the baths this spring became wild about
her, and a certain type of elderly English peer always wants to marry
her. (I suppose I do look pale to-day.) Victoria loves art, and really
knows something about it. She adores to potter around those queer places
abroad where you see strange English and Germans and Americans with red
books in their hands. What am I to do about this young man of whom you
speak--whatever his name is? I suppose Victoria will marry him--it would
be just like her. But what can I do, Fanny? I can't manage her, and it's
no use going to her father. He would only laugh. Augustus actually told
me once there was no such thing as social position in this country!"

"American men of affairs," Mrs. Pomfret judicially replied, "are too
busy to consider position. They make it, my dear, as a by-product." Mrs.
Pomfret smiled, and mentally noted this aptly technical witticism for
use again.

"I suppose they do," assented the Rose of Sharon, "and their daughters
sometimes squander it, just as their sons squander their money."

"I'm not at all sure that Victoria is going to squander it," was Mrs.
Pomfret's comforting remark. "She is too much of a personage, and she
has great wealth behind her. I wish Alice were more like her, in
some ways. Alice is so helpless, she has to be prodded and prompted
continually. I can't leave her for a moment. And when she is married,
I'm going into a sanatorium for six months."

"I hear," said Mrs. Flint, "that Humphrey Crewe is quite epris."

"Poor dear Humphrey!" exclaimed Mrs. Pomfret, "he can think of nothing
else but politics."

But we are not to take up again, as yet, the deeds of the crafty
Ulysses. In order to relate an important conversation between Mrs.
Pomfret and the Rose of Sharon, we have gone back a week in this
history, and have left Vi