illida looked down and began to pinch the tips of her fingers again.
She shrunk a little from Mrs. Van Horne's set; she thought her dress
probably beneath their standard, but with an effort she put away such
fears as frivolous, and promised to go.

Thursday afternoon found Phillida sitting by Mrs. Hilbrough in the Van
Horne parlor, which was draped with the costly products of distant
looms, wrought by the dusky fingers of Orientals inheriting the slowly
perfected special skill of generations, and with the fabrics produced by
mediaeval workmen whose artistic products had gathered value as all their
fellows had perished; for other races and other ages have contributed
their toil to the magnificence of a New York palace. The great room was
spanned by a ceiling on which the creative imaginations of great
artists had lavished rare fancies in gold and ivory, while the
costliest, if not the noblest, paintings and sculptures of our modern
time were all about a parlor whose very chairs and ottomans had been
designed by men of genius.

Once the words of Mrs. Frankland were heard with these surroundings, one
felt that it would be wrong to attribute to ambitious motives her desire
for such an environment. She might rather be said to have been drawn
here by an inspiration for artistic harmony. The resonant periods of
Bossuet would hardly have echoed through the modern centuries if he had
not had the magnificent court of Louis the Great for a sounding-board.
When Mrs. Frankland spoke in the Van Horne parlor her auditors felt that
the mellifluous voice and stately sentences could not have had a more
appropriate setting, and that the splendid apartment could not have been
put to a more fitting use. Even the simple religious songs used at the
beginning and close of the meetings were accompanied upon a grand piano
of finest tone, whose richly inlaid case represented the expenditure of
a moderate fortune. Mrs. Van Horne could command the best amateur
musical talent, so that the little emotional Moody-and-Sankeys that Mrs.
Frankland selected were so overlaid and glorified in the performance as
to be almost transformed into works of art.

Phillida looked upon these evidences of lavish expenditure with less
bedazzlement than one might have expected in a person of her age. For
she had grown up under shelter from the world. While she remained in the
antipodes her contact with life outside her own family had been small.
In Brooklyn her mother