in picture-galleries and cathedrals and palaces; she had
seen all the right views, all the right ceremonies, and all the
censored picturesqueness. Don't get any Cook's tourist idea, please,
about Miss Somers. Her mother had died young, and her gifted father had
taken her to a hundred places that the school-teacher on a holiday never
gets to and thinks of only in connection with geography lessons. She had
followed the Great Wall of China, she had stood before the tomb of
Tamburlaine, she had shaded her eyes from the glare of KaA-rouan the
Holy, she had chaffered in Tiflis and in Trebizond. All this before she
was twenty-five. At that time her father's health broke, and they
proceeded to live permanently in New York. Her wandering life had
steeped her in delights, but kept her innocent of love-affairs. When you
have fed on historic beauty, on the great plots of the past, the best
tenor voices in the world, it is pretty hard to find a man who doesn't
in his own person, leave out something essential to romance. She had
herself no particular beauty, and therefore the male sex could get on
without her. A few fell in love with her, but she was too enchanted and
amused with the world in general to set to work at the painful process
of making a hero out of any one of them. She was a sweet-tempered
creature; her mental snobbishness was not a pose, but perfectly
inevitable; she had a great many friends. As she had a quick wit and the
historic imagination, you can imagine--remembering her bringing up--that
she was an entertaining person when she entered upon middle age: when,
that is, she was proceeding from the earlier to the later thirties.

It was natural that Kathleen Somers and her father--who was a bit
precious and pompous, in spite of his ironies--should gather about them
a homogeneous group. The house was pleasant and comfortable--they were
too sophisticated to be "periodic"--and there was always good talk
going, if you happened to be the kind that could stand good talk. Of
course you had to pass an examination first. You had at least to show
that you "caught on." They were high-brow enough to permit themselves
sudden enthusiasms that would have damned a low-brow. You mustn't like
"Peter Pan," but you might go three nights running to see some really
perfect clog-dancing at a vaudeville theatre. Do you see what I mean?
They were eclectic with a vengeance. It wouldn't do for you to cultivate
the clog-dancer _and_ like "Peter P