his frock-coat,
fitting snugly around his well-knit, erect figure, and with the
silk hat which she noticed on the table in the hall as she went in.
Frock-coats and silk hats were objects seldom encountered in La
Chance, except in illustrations to magazine-stories, or in photographs
of life in New York or Washington. But of course, she reflected,
Colonel Fiske lived most of his life in Washington, about the
cosmopolitan delights of which he talked most eloquently to the two
ladies.

As was inevitable, Sylvia also met Eleanor Hubert more or less at Mrs.
Draper's. Sylvia had been rendered acutely self-conscious in that
direction by Mrs. Draper's very open comments on her role in the life
of the other girl, and at first had been so smitten by embarrassment
as positively to be awkward, a rare event in her life: but she was
soon set at ease by the other girl's gentle friendliness, so simple
and sincere that even Sylvia's suspicious vanity could not feel it
to be condescension. Eleanor's sweet eyes shone so kindly on her
successful rival, and she showed so frank and unenvious an
admiration of Sylvia's wit and learning, displayed perhaps a trifle
ostentatiously by that young lady in the ensuing conversation with
Mrs. Draper, that Sylvia had a fresh, healing impulse of shame for her
own recently acquired attitude of triumphing hostility towards the
world.

At the same time she felt a surprised contempt for the other girl's
ignorance and almost illiteracy. Whatever else Eleanor had learned in
the exclusive and expensive girls' school in New York, she had not
learned to hold her own in a conversation on the most ordinary topics;
and as for Mrs. Draper's highly spiced comments on life and folk, her
young friend made not the slightest attempt to cope with them or even
to understand them. The alluring mistress of the house might talk of
sex-antagonism and the hatefulness of the puritanical elements of
American life as much as she pleased. It all passed over the head of
the lovely, fair girl, sipping her tea and raising her candid eyes
to meet with a trustful smile, perhaps a little blank, the glance of
whomever chanced to be looking at her. It was significant that she had
the same smile for each of the three very dissimilar persons who sat
about the tea-table. Of all the circle into which Sylvia's changed
life had plunged her, Eleanor, the type of the conventional society
bud, was, oddly enough, the only one she cared to talk abou