adies were, however, not favored with a great number of
invitations to Mrs. Draper's select and amusing teas and dinners,
as that lady had a great fancy for surrounding herself with youth,
meaning, for the most part, naturally enough, masculine youth. With
an unerring and practised eye she picked out from each class the few
young men who were to her purpose, and proclaiming with the most
express lack of reticence the forty-three years which she by no means
looked, she took these chosen few under a wing frankly maternal,
giving them, in the course of an intimate acquaintance with her and
the dim and twilight ways of her house and life, an enlightening
experience of a civilization which she herself said, with a humorous
appreciation of her own value, quite made over the young, unlicked
cubs. This statement of her influence on most of the young men drawn
into her circle was perhaps not much exaggerated.

From time to time she also admitted into this charmed circle a young
girl or two, though almost never one of the University girls, of whom
she made the jolliest possible fun. Her favorites were the daughters
of good La Chance families who at seventeen had "finished" at Miss
Home's Select School for Young Ladies, and who came out in society not
later than eighteen. She seemed able, as long as she cared to do it,
to exercise as irresistible a fascination over these youthful members
of her own sex as over the older masculine undergraduates of the
University. They copied their friend's hats and neckwear and shoes and
her mannerisms of speech, were miserable if she neglected them for a
day, furiously jealous of each other, and raised to the seventh
heaven by attention from her. Just at present the only girl admitted
frequently to Mrs. Draper's intimacy was Eleanor Hubert.

On the day following the Gymnasium exhibition, when Sylvia, promptly
at five, entered the picturesque vine-covered Draper house, she
found it occupied by none of the usual habitues of the place. The
white-capped, black-garbed maid who opened the door to the girl held
aside for her a pair of heavy brown-velvet portieres which veiled
the entrance to the drawing-room. The utter silence of this servitor
seemed portentous and inhuman to the young guest, unused to the polite
convention that servants cast no shadow and do not exist save when
serving their superiors.

She found herself in a room as unlike any she had ever seen as though
she had stepped into a new