ler. She was wholly intent upon fulfilling the sudden purpose
that brought her, and she was no more self-conscious than she was finely
intelligent. For Sibyl Sheridan belonged to a type Scriptural in its
antiquity. She was merely the idle and half-educated intriguer who may
and does delude men, of course, and the best and dullest of her own sex
as well, finding invariably strong supporters among these latter. It is
a type that has wrought some damage in the world and would have wrought
greater, save for the check put upon its power by intelligent women
and by its own "lack of perspective," for it is a type that never sees
itself. Sibyl followed her impulses with no reflection or question--it
was like a hound on the gallop after a master on horseback. She had not
even the instinct to stop and consider her effect. If she wished to make
a certain impression she believed that she made it. She believed that
she was believed.

"My mother asked me to say that she was sorry she couldn't come down,"
Mary said, when they were seated.

Sibyl ran the scale of a cooing simulance of laughter, which she had
been brought up to consider the polite thing to do after a remark
addressed to her by any person with whom she was not on familiar terms.
It was intended partly as a courtesy and partly as the foundation for an
impression of sweetness.

"Just thought I'd fly in a minute," she said, continuing the cooing to
relieve the last doubt of her gentiality. "I thought I'd just behave
like REAL country neighbors. We are almost out in the country, so far
from down-town, aren't we? And it seemed such a LOVELY day! I wanted
to tell you how much I enjoyed meeting those nice people at tea that
afternoon. You see, coming here a bride and never having lived here
before, I've had to depend on my husband's friends almost entirely, and
I really've known scarcely anybody. Mr. Sheridan has been so engrossed
in business ever since he was a mere boy, why, of course--"

She paused, with the air of having completed an explanation.

"Of course," said Mary, sympathetically accepting it.

"Yes. I've been seeing quite a lot of the Kittersbys since that
afternoon," Sibyl went on. "They're really delightful people. Indeed
they are! Yes--"

She stopped with unconscious abruptness, her mind plainly wandering to
another matter; and Mary perceived that she had come upon a definite
errand. Moreover, a tensing of Sibyl's eyelids, in that moment of
abstraction as