"

"Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Winters" says Nancy with dutiful
hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little
lists. "As an _artist_, as an _artist_, dear Nancy, especially." Mrs.
Winters breathes somewhat heavily, "Things That Should Interest you.
Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish--but some of
the Things in New York that I, Personally, have found Worth While."

The Things that Mrs. Winters Has Found Personally Worth While include
a great many public monuments. She will give Nancy a similar list of
Things Worth While in Paris, too, before Nancy sails--and Nancy smiles
acceptably as each one of them is mentioned.

Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking--for if she did she
might become startlingly human at once as even the most perfectly poised
of spinsters is apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her
neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely of various quaint and
everlasting places of torment that might very well be devised for Mrs.
Winters--and of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will
matter very little to anybody what becomes of her and least of all
to herself--and that Mrs. Winters doesn't know that she saw a chance
mention of Mr. Oliver Crowe, the author of "Dancer's Holiday" today in
the "Bookman" and that she cut it out because it had Oliver's name in
it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of her bag with his creased
and recreased first letter and the lucky piece she had from her nicest
uncle and a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a dozen other
small precious things.

XXX

The dance is at the Piper's this time--the last Piper dance of the
Southampton season and the biggest--other people may give dances
after it but everybody who knows will only think of them as relatively
pleasant or useless addenda. The last Piper Dance has been the official
period to the Southampton summer ever since Elinor's _debut_--and this
time the period is sure to be bigger and rounder than ever since it
closes the most successful season Southampton has ever had.

Nothing very original about its being a masquerade, from Mr. Piper
a courteously grey-haired mandarin in jade-green robes beside Mrs.
Piper--lovely Mary Embree that was--in the silks of a Chinese empress,
heavy and shining and crusted as the wings of a jeweler's butterfly,
her reticent eyes watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing as
impassively