ly aunt that I'd ever own was one that my family
would never tell me much about. I had to find out about her for myself.
Take it from me, though, she was some aunt."

"Tastes in aunts differ, I expect," says I. "And Mrs. Parker Smith don't
claim to be a reg'lar aunt, anyway. She seems harmless, too. All she
wants is a chance to give you a rosy prospectus of life on a cow farm
and blow you to a dinner at the Napoleon."

"Think of that!" says Claire. "And I've been living for weeks on
window-sill meals, with now and then a ptomaine-defying gorge at the
Pink Poodle's sixty-cent table d'hote. Oh, I'll come, I'll come! But I
warn you: the Parker Smith person will understand before the evening is
over that I was born to no cow farm in Illinois."

With that she glides off to do a dinner change.

"I believe it is going to be quite an interesting party, don't you?"
says Vee.

"The signs point that way," says I. "But the old girl really ought to
wear shock-absorbers if she wants to last through the evenin'. S-s-s-sh!
Claire is comin' back."

This time she's draped herself in a pale yellow kimono with blue
triangles stenciled all over it.

"Speaking of perfectly good aunts," says she, "there!" And she displays
a silver-framed photo. It's an old-timer done in faded brown, and shows
a dashin' young party wearin' funny sleeves, a ringlet cascade on one
side of her head, and a saucy little pancake lid over one ear.

"That," explains Claire, "was my aunt Clara Lamar; not my real aunt, you
know, but near enough for me to claim her. This was taken in '82, I
believe."

"Really!" says Vee. "She must have been quite pretty."

"That doesn't half tell it," says Claire. "She was a charmer, simply
fascinating. Not beautiful, you know, but she had a way with her. She
was brilliant, daring, one of the kind that men raved over. At twenty
she married a Congressman, fat and forty. She hadn't lived in Washington
six months before her receptions were crushes. She flirted
industriously. A young French aide and an army officer fought a duel
over her. And, while the capital was buzzing with that, she eloped with
another diplomat, a Russian. For a year or two they lived in Paris. She
had her salon. Then the Russian got himself killed in some way, and she
soon married again--another American, quite wealthy. He brought her back
to New York, and they lived in one of those old brown-stone mansions on
lower Fifth Avenue. Her dinner parties were the