after
him, informingly.

CHAPTER XIII

LYDIA DECIDES IN PERFECT FREEDOM

The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful
morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the Endbury
_Chronicle_, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish
adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was
heralded, "The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia's
party decorations." And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a
third comer was introduced into the hall--Mme. Boyle herself, the best
dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of
the debutante's Paris dresses, the debutante having found the change
back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite
noticeably thinner.

"It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle's tournoor exactly
perfect," Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her
loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of
Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a
pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted
her competent, kindly Celtic face.

Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to
Lydia's room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly
Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. "Oh, Madame,
just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!" As she
continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling
her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her
up like wings. In common with many other estimable people, she could
not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and
the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a
sweet taste of victory in her mouth.

She greeted Miss Burgess with the careful cordiality due to an ally of
many years' standing, and with a manner perceptibly but indefinably
different from that which she would have bestowed on a social equal.
Mrs. Emery had labored to acquire exactly that tone in her dealings with
the society reporter, and her achievement of it was a fact which brought
an equal satisfaction to both women. Miss Burgess' mother was an
Englishwoman, an ex-housekeeper, who had transmitted to her daughter a
sense, rare as yet in America, of the beauty and dignity of class
distinctions. In her turn Miss Burgess herself,