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observations, subtle with double entendre, harmless and otherwise.

She met people of fashion, of wealth, and both; and now and then
encountered one or two of those men and women of real distinction whose
names and peregrinations are seldom chronicled in the papers.

She heard the great artists of the two operas sing in private; was
regaled with information concerning the remarkable decency or indecency
of their private careers. She saw fashionable plays which instructed the
public about squalor, murder, and men's mistresses, which dissected very
skilfully and artistically the ethics of moral degradation. And being as
healthy and curious as the average girl, she found in the theatres
material with which to inform herself about certain occult mysteries
concerning which, heretofore, she had been left mercifully in doubt.

In spite of Kathleen, it was inevitable that she should acquire from the
fashionable in literature, music, and the drama, that sorry and
unnecessary wisdom which ages souls.

And if what she saw or heard ever puzzled her, there was always
somebody, young or old, to enlighten her innocent perplexity; and with
each illumination she shrank a little less aloof from this shabby
wisdom gilded with "art," which she could not choose but accept as fact,
but the depravity of which she never was entirely able to comprehend.

In March the Seagrave twins arrived at the alleged age of discretion. On
their twenty-first birthday the Half Moon Trust Company went solemnly
into court and rendered an accounting of its stewardship; the yearly
reports which it had made during the term of its trusteeship were
brought forward, examined by the court, and the great Half Moon Trust
Company was given an honourable discharge. It had done its duty. The
twins were masters of their financial and moral fate.

It was about that moribund period of the social solstice when the fag
end of the season had fizzled out like a wet firecracker in the April
rains; and Geraldine and Kathleen were tired, mentally and bodily. And
Scott was buying polo ponies from a British friend and shotguns from a
needy gentleman from Long Island.

It had been rather trying work to rid Geraldine of the aspirants for her
fortune; during the winter she was proposed to under almost every
conceivable condition and circumstance. Kathleen had been bored and
badgered and bothered and importuned to the verge of exhaustion; Scott
was used, shamelessly, without his