The Lady and the Ladder

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXV, Issue 13, 30 September 1905, Page 4

The Lady and the Ladder

The Annals of an American Countess

By

Harrison Rhodes

L' is perhaps to be regretted, in the interest of the reader, that, so far as our heroine’s early life is concerned, the truth is not, as it is often said to be, stranger than fiction. The unauthentic stories are so amazing, however, that it would really be asking too much of truth. Since it is impossible for the veracious author to cause the thrills which went through the friends of her later and more European years at the rumours spread by rival American ladies that she had been variously a typewriter, an upper housemaid, the belle of a mining camp, an actress in one of Charles Frohman’s companies, a trapeze performer, and an attendant at the ribbon-counter in a Chicago department store, he can at least experience the satisfaction that comes from flatly contradicting sueh reports. And the truths which one can guarantee, though less sensational, are not wholly unimportant. For example, there were moments in her career when the collect figure of her income would have been as welcome to London and Paris as a cloud-burst to some parched caravai> traversing the Sahara. One can promise in the course of the present narrative moderately exact details as to the periods both before and after the astonishing transactions in Peoria and Milwaukee Air l.ine which made her name known not only in LaSalle but in Wall-street. And tlie exact number of times she appeared before the altar for the ollie of matrimony is worth while setting down. At the time when the gossip of London was most busy with her name she had b en, not four times, but twice wedded, ami, though twenty-eight out of the thirty years of her life had been passed in Chicago, she owed it in each case to the respectable agency of death and no' to the doubtful intermediation of the divorce court that she had become remarriageable—if one may venture upon that word. Nothing about a woman whose complexion was once commented upon favourably by His Majesty of England, as she strolled across the Royal Enclosure at Goodwood, can be wholly without interest. yet in all honesty one must confess that tin’ most striking thing about her early days was their dullness. Had the suburbs of Chicago come into their own. and bad a historian written down the simple annals of Kenwood and all the regions south of Forty-second-street, some mention must inevitably have crept in of Miss Mary Grainger. At the very least, it may be said that in any account of a dance given by the Hyde Park High School or by the Greek Letter Fraternities of the University of Chicago her name would necessarily have been “among those present.” Everybody knew her. and, though perhaps she was not quite a belle, everybody liked her. She was always pretty, though never beautiful. She had. from the beginning, an eye of china blue, the loveliest pink cheek, and the softest golden brown hair imaginable. It cannot be claimed for her sli recognised and lamented the fact, though she determined that it should md ruin her life - that she was a Gibson type. She was not tall, and her figure, though always pretty, inevitably remind’d one of a daintv and well-nour-ished ti tle pigeon. Lady Tom Trefford said in after years—and meant it unkindiv that the straight-fronted sort had been invented at the psychological and nee ssnry moment for our heroine. Rut after all they were invented: that is the important point. On the whole, so far as looks went. Marv Grainger was quite well enough equipped. She was amiable, kind-hearted, and fond of gaiety. She was not exceptionally serious nor steadfast in character.

Her girlish hesi'ation as to the form of her own name—this is no sly reference to her matrimonial career —might be evidence. She was born just a little before they began to christen girl babies in America Gladys, Muriel, and Hazel. Christened Mary, she was naturallycalled Mame. But this nickname, unpromising though it might seem to a foreigner, was in the hands of a young woman of that time capable of great variation. Like other Mames of her day and period, Miss Grainger was successively Mame, Mayme, Mairnie, Mayniie, and finally Maeme. The last proved more than even she herself could bear, and—as the fashion had then changed and Kenwood was appreciating to the full such “fragrant and stately old names” as Kate, Martha, and Lucinda — she was enabled gracefully to re urn to Mary. To this ultimately she dung. For when she came to London she dimly divined that even if it were true, as some Americans maintained, that the English had no sense of humour, they would be moved to disrespectful mirth by “Maeme.” She contented herself wi'h Mary, ft was perhaps as well. At the age of twenty Mary Grainger became Mary Southworth. It was a completely happy marriage, made so by Edgar’s and Mary’s strong though peaceful love. During the first year a baby was horn, a girl; but .it; lived only ten months. Its death was the..only sorrow of Edgar’s married life. It was the onlysorrow of Mary’s life that she could never quite forget. At the oddest crises of her later years we shall find her clinging to the shadowy memory of the tiny pink thing that might have grown up to call her mother, and doing kindnesses

to others who could never know that they were really done for the little dead Martha. But Mary, though she grieved tenderly, was not a woman to indulge in morbid sorrow. She had still her husband, her home, and the pleasures of her life in Kenwood. A good position in a wholesale carriage house enabled Edgar Southworth to give his wife a neat little “home,” pure colonial, like fifty others in the same street, but more comfortable than most of them. The comfort was, however, due more to Mary’s talent than to Edgar’s money. It is commonly said that what a house supremely needs is “the touch of a woman’s hand,” but one might call many a married man to witness that the result of the touch is not always chairs that are easy-, norcushions that are where and what they should be. Mary, besides being tasteful and dainty, was what is called a cozy sort of a w-oman, and ner surrounding was always entitled to share with her that adjective. Years afterward, the Louis-Quinze drawing-room in Curzonstreet was no’ed for containing no chair in which a man (nothing is said about women) would find himself uncomfortable. Mary promptly banished all others. And in Cornell Avenue she triumphed over even the parlour, which was felt by every one to be almost as “homelike” as the sitting-room. Mrs Southworth was often spoken of as artistic, and the era of Japanese auction sales, setting in about this time, enabled her to justify the adjective at small cost. The house was a delightful setting for such “entertaining” as Mr and Mrs Southworth did. and it was at “entertaining” that she shone.

Cornell Avenue was, however, forced to conclude that she was not intellectual. She would not even join the Reading Club, although one winter it went through Motley’s Dutch Republic and another studied the English poets before Chaucer. But there was no one who could “jolly up a par:y” better than she, and no one in the Reading Club who could sing a popular song or do the cakewalk so well. The “Lakeside Progressive Euchre Club” always had a full attendance the times it met with her. When the refreshments were served, the cream on the Vienna coffee was so very frothy that one almost felt as if Mrs South worth had lived in that city. The ice cream which she served—once with a hot chocolate sauce and again with walnuts and maple syrup—was so unusual and elegant that every one secretly felt that their hostess had raised not only the gastronomic but the social tone of the club. If Mary had any especial ambitions, and was pleased when the broadening current of Kenwood social life introduced her into a few more spacious homes in Drexel Boulevard, it was because, as she put it, she liked “to see how- people did things,” so that she could do them herself. Along these simple lines she achieved much in life. Nothing at that time, however, led one to suppose that her future was to be anything other than pleasantly unhistorie. Then, in the fourth year of their married life, Edgar Southworth died. Mary sincerely grieved for him, and for two years wore mourning of the pret iest description. But she was young, and it was inevitable that in a kind of birdlike, twittering way, she should grow cheerful, interested in the present and thoughtful of the future. She might probably have married again had she thought of it, for men usually liked her. Some of the ladies of the Euchre Club talked of Hugh Erskine. He was an old friend of Mary’s; indeed, in her days at the Hyde Park School he had been her first love. Whether women ever forget such things or not is a debatable question. At any rate men do, and Hugh did. At least, he was too busy on the Stock Exchange in those years either to remember the past or to turn sentimentally toward the future. He was full of life and spirits, quite capable of loving and winning a woman. But it often happens in America that men have no time to fall in love, no time even to think of doing so. Hugh had been a friend of Edgar’s as well, and to him had been left the management of Mary’s small business affairs. This was ample explanation of his seeing her the occasional times he did. It was instinct rather than knowledge of any facts which made gossip furtively link his name with Mrs Southworth’s. In the meantime, to put an end to such talk, something considerably more astonishing happened, and Mary became, for the first time, and by no means for the last, an object of real public interest. The event was led up to By the most usual and the dullest ways. After Edgar’s dea*h his widow found that his insurance money and his small savings gave her something to live on—not enough. No one would have called Mary a persistent or a determined woman, yet it is eminently characteristic of her that it never for a moment occurred to her to give up the house in Cornell Avenue, though it was much too expensive for her. She had grown used to its standard of comfortable living, and her mind had no power of turning itself toward anything less pleasant. She solved the problem by taking in two young ladies as boarders, and by securing a position to conduct a cooking-class in the Allerson Institute for the Technical Education of the Masses. Mary had all the domes’ic virtues; never had either Miss Browne or Miss Stackpole known so comfortable a home: and never, one may confidently assert, had the masses been taught a more simple, “tasty” cuisine. The work was not dull nor was it undignified. The young boarders—one a decorator and the other a music teacher—were quite up to the social level of the Euchre Club, and as for the Institute, it had enlisted in its support some of the best-known ladies and the solidest business men of the

South Side. It was at an evening reception, given at the second annual opening of the classes in September, that the instructor in cooking met Henry T. Whiting. It was in St. Stephen’s Church in the following March that she became his wife. Those who habitually speak of our heroine’s becoming Mr Whiting’s wife as the greatest event of her life seem to her present chronicler to undervalue the importance of her later transformation into his widow. Yet they were justified in considering it a step. Mr Henry T. Whiting was sixty years of age. He had been married once and had one child, a daughter aged nineteen. For two years he had been a widower, and had lived alone in the big house on Drexel Boulevard which the late Emmeline Whiting had caused to be built and furnished. Her husband, whose fortune had been made in the well-known ‘‘Whiting Line ’ of grain boats upon the Lakes, was a man of simple tastes, who grouped an enormous number of things which he instinctively distrusted in life under the name of “style,” yet felt—as did so many rich men of his time —that to build a large stone house and to furnish it in bad taste was, in a way, a suitable and dignified public manifestation of his position and his bank account. The first Mrs Wliiting had had no social interests; in their place she felt a passion for making crazy-quilts which had far out-lived the vogue of that eccentric custom in the community generally. There was always a heavy Sunday dinner at two, and to this came occasional cousins and perhaps a business friend of Mr Whiting’s, bringing his wife. At these functions Henry T., as Emmeline called him, was invariably present, but he scarcely considered them in the nature of a pleasure. Subconsciously, he felt them a kind of penance, which, since he did not go to church, took the place of that pilgrimage. Beyond these Sunday dinners, Mrs Whiting’s “entertaining” consisted of a “tea” given in February, when some five hundred representative women of Kenwood crowded into the house and ruined their appetite for dinner by feasting on chicken salad and ice cream washed down with tea, coffee and a number of cloying beverages concocted with fruit and syrups. On these occasions business invariably called Mr Whiting to Milwaukee. He had a healthy mistrust of the appearance of his sex at afternoon parties which he put concisely, if inelegantly, when he said that he “wouldn’t be found dead at one of them.” In brief, his home was not a place of public festivity. Nor was it the scene, if one may put it that way, of much private comfort. (Mary recognised this, with her invaluable instinct for what makes men snug, and did wonders even in her first three days.) After his wife’s death, though the discomfort never really increased much, it was made, by the added loneliness, to seem to do so. When Mr Whiting went to the opening of the Allerson Institute, he had already, for over a year, been quietly turning the question of remarriage over in his mind. Mary’s own prettiness and sensible, comfortable ways are quite sufficient to explain why his wandering fancies suddenly took definite shape about her comely person. If an additional reason be needed it might perhaps be found in the fact that a beefsteak almost raw, and fried potatoes sogged with grease not quite above reproach, had adorned the heavy mahogany dining-table of the Whiting house that night, and that Mrs Southworth had been introduced to her new friend as the teacher of cooking. Considering the matter on yet broader lines, one may find other motives which led Mr Whiting to think of matrimony. Pauline Whiting, his daughter, aged nineteen, sobbing out her soul to a bosom friend in a bedroom at Miss Hart’s school in New York on the evening when the news of her father’s engagement had reached her, managed in the tumult of her tears to enunciate an important truth when she wailed: “Oh, if I had been at home it never would have happened!” Her father’s realisation of this truth and of all it implied may serve as an additional reason for his remarriage. He had already had experience of his daughter’s force of character and the power of her determined will; to borrow from the language of diplomacy, what he wanted was to set up a buffer state. Poor Emmeline had never controlled

Pauline, but Mr Whiting, trusting in the more distant relationship of stepmotherhood, hoped that Mary might. Pauline’s sobs on the Riverside Drive neither improved her own appearance nor the situation in Chicago. She did. indeed, favour her father with a letter, but the epistolary style of youth is rarely sufficiently developed to make writing anything like an adequate substitute for the spoken word. From a distance her father could be all that a parent should be—gentle but firm. Pauline took counsel of necessity, and pledging to silence the bosom friend whom she had bedewed with her first tears of sorrow and rage, announced to the school her delight in the approaching event. “It will be so nice for me,” she exclaimed ecstatically, “to have some one to chaperon me next year.” A fellow-pupil from Philadelphia interjected a doubt as to the existence of the institution of chaperonage in such remote regions as Chicago. “Chaperons?” queried Pauline, with suspicious sweetness of tone. “Yes, we have them. It’s all the same everywhere, Chicago, New York, London, isn’t it? Don’t you have them in Philadelphia? I always supposed you did, at least society people.” Then she again gave way to her girlish enthusiasm over her new stepmother that was to be. "You girls can’t imagine how glad I am. They say she is just lovely and too fascinating!”

Pauline had never seen Mrs Southworth, nor had any one furnished her with an accurate description. But in the recesses of her brain she had ideas on the training of parents, which would apply to s ep-parents. If the second Mrs Whiting was not “just lovely and too fascinating” she must be made so, that, was allPauline came home a week before the wedding, and Mary, remembering with tender sadness and eyes shining with tears a little child that had died when it was too young to call her “mother,” was gently fluttered at the thought of meeting her. But Pauline was unsentimental, though correct in attitude. Mary was chilled. “Perhaps you had rather not call me mo her,” she said. Yet, since she was a woman, who shall say precisely in what spirit she meant what she added so gently—“l’m only nine years older than you, dear”—she looked no more than four—“and I’m afraid I sha’n’t succeed in looking the part.” “Oh, you’ll do!” said Paulino, with the air of forgiving both her stepmothers youth and any possible innuendo. “I’ll call you mother. I need one in my business.” Here it may be noted parenthetically (though with no attempt thus to minimise the importance of the fact) that some stepdaughters as downright plain as Pauline might have found it difficult to forgive stepmothers as downright pretty as Mary. Pauline’s lack of looks cannot be insisted on too strongly, it has so much to do with the story of the lives of these two heroines. Alas, that the fiction we so smilingly support

abroad that all American girls are pretty must be given up at home! Pauline was plain as are a million other girls. Her figure was flat; her face was a sallow mud colour; her features were not even ugly, they seemed merely a random assortment that could scarcely be said to combine into a face of any individuality; her pompadour of stringy, mouse-brown hair arose from a polished though knobby brow in a way that positively irritated one, so exact was its similarity to a million others. Poor Pauline, from whose clear, pale blue eye ambition shone, did indeed need a mother and a pretty one. Yet you could have pardoned her if she had failed to see it clearly. Pauline may have needed a mother, Mary reflected during the next few days, but evidently she did not need maternal counsel or advice. Unhesitatingly she altered every arrangement that her father and Mrs Southworth had made for the wedding. First of all, the bridal gown received attention. It was, even Pauline admitted, becoming, but that was not altogether the question. The skirt was slightly gathered at the waist, and they were wearing—so Pauline asserted with all the air of a New Yorker making glad the waste places of the West —nothing but skirts with yokes, the fullness gathered in a band just below the hips. Whether she knew this from constant attendance at the more recent weddings of the Four Hundred,

or merely from a study of the Sunday supplements of newspapers, it would be indiscreet to inquire. She announced it convincingly, she seemed almost embittered over it; and Mary, though less vehement, was as ready as her future daughter to force the wretched skirt under or into the yoke (whichever may be the correct expression), if “yokes were being worn.” She had always been glad to know how people did things, so that she could do them herself. Pauline, for a schoolgirl, seemed to have what one might call an almost impassioned knowledge of such matters. Mary began to view her with respect, not altogether unmixed with fear. Poor- buffer states, how notoriously uncertain and unreliable they are! The ceremony had been planned for the evening in the quiet of Mrs Southworth’s little home. Paulino insisted upon St. Stephen’s and “high noon.” “Why the devil ‘high?’” asked her father. Neither Pauline nor the devil could tell him. Apparently no one knows. Yet noon is still “high” wherever fashionable aspirations are concerned. Whatever other arrangements there were, Miss Whiting changed, and then, and not until then, did she allow the wedding to proceed. Both Mr Whiting and Mrs Southworth secretly feared that she might at the last moment attempt to change the bride. But Pro videnee and Pauline allowed noon to be high, as arranged, and Mrs Southworth to become Mrs Whiting. Then Pauline withdrew her watchful care and returned to her study of French, English history, and the life of the Four Hundred.

Providence, left behind, in its own strange way judged it wise that Henry T.. happy with his little wife and full of kind projects for the future of both women and his family, should be seized with pneumonia and die within three months after the wedding. He knew a few hours before that the end was coming, and talked of it with a grave, gentle dignity and an unabashed sweetness of nature which at ordinary times he had almost appeared to be at pains to conceal, seeming thus to double Mary's approaching loss. About his wife his feelings were all gratitude, and for the future he frankly wished her all that a young woman might wish for life to bring her. "There’s only one thing 1 hope you'll do for me, girl,” he said. "It’s hard on Pauline not to have a mother, and I hoped I’d given her one in you. Look after her, won't you? 1 don’t want it to spoil anything for you, but I’d like you to see that she gets her ehance in the world, and grows up right.” Mary was kneeling by his bedside and she was crying. Was she, perhaps, thinking of the little Martha who was dead? Her answer to Henry T. was to kiss the hand she held. "I'll do what 1 can,” she said. "Pauline is a handful,” said her father, and there was a humorous twinkle in his old tired eyes. Even on Alary’s tear-stained face there trembled for a moment the half of a smile. "I’ll do what I can,” she said, again. "That’s right, girl,” came from Henry T., and turning a little he sank back as if to try to sleep again. This was perhaps two hours before he died. Mary had uot been in love with him in any romantic sense, but she had been grateful for his affection, his simple kindness, and the comfort and position he had given her. She was honestly sad. Yet she did not feel that she was left alone. Indeed, she felt acutely, when the telegram came from New York telling her which train Pauline had caught, that she had been left to her stepdaughter. She sat by the library fire crying gently, and wondering whether Pauline would let her wear the mourning she had ordered. Other questions, broader and more remote, pressed in upon her. but she found no answer to them, and she sighed. She was in God's hands, she felt—and in Pauline’s.

11. Before Mrs Whiting can be presented to the reader in the delightful setting of smart life where later she shines, a little more must really be said of those obscurer, duller, American days. Those, however, who are fitted to appreciate in its full flavour the story of our lady on the ladder will find it all the better for the shadowy background of Kenwood and the Lakeside Euchre Club against which shall move later the figures of the nobility and gentry of England and also that of a Duke of France. The Louis-Quinze armchairs of the Curzon-street drawing-room, covered with old red brocade, will seem the more luxurious if our attention fix itself for a moment on the patent rocker in peacock blue crushed plush in the late Emmeline Whiting’s bedroom, where Henry T.’s first wife had sat so often making crazy-quilts, and where now his first widow, if one may put it that way, sat talking to the first wife’s daughter. The funeral was over. If one does not dwell upon the grief of Mrs and Miss Whiting it is not because that was not real, but because it would only delay the progress of our narrative toward the brighter and merrier days which are its goal. The eyes of both women were still swollen and red with wet-ping. Yet somehow they already heard again the whirr of life’s ceaseless machinery about them, and felt that they must face the future and their plans. Plans were chaotic in the minds of both, but with a sufficient income one may almost face chaos with equanimity. And Mary and Pauline had each been left with about 50,000 dollars a year. “We’ll be in mourning for a year at the very least,” said Pauline. “Wo can’t go anywhere or do any entertaining.” added Mary. She could not help thinking how she could have entertained the Lakeside Club; there was space in the reception-room alone for eight tables. And in imagination she has already seen herself giving a nice luncheon party to the ladies of

Drexel Boulevard who had called on her since her marriage—ladies, be it said, whose names impressed Cornell Avenue considerably. Upon this modestly ambitious reverie her stepdaughter’s voice broke contemptuously: "Entertaining?” she said. “Much entertaining we could do here, anyhow!” "Oh, I don’t know,” replied Mary deprecatingly. “It’s a lovely house, 1 think. Of course, there are lots of things I want to do to it. I think it seemed—she hesitated, not wishing to wound Pauline—“sort of stiff, don’t you?” "The only thing I want to do to the house,” said the younger woman, “is to sell it. I don’t see why they wouldn’t build it on the North Side. 1 was only 11 when they did it, but I knew then it wasn’t the thing to do. They might just about as well have stayed on the West Side where we were.” (This, for the benefit of non Chicagoans, is how you swing around the social compass, West, South, North —the East is the Lake where some fall in.) “Of course, papa didn’t like society, and mamma never went anywhere. They were perfectly contented down here.. But 1 don t, think it’s quite fair on me.” “The North Side’s nice, but they say it’s ever so much dirtier there than here. Window curtains only stay clean about a week,” said Mary soothingly. “They can be washed, though,” commented Pauline. She looked at her stepmother for a moment. She was glad that Drexel Boulevard seemed not only an advance from Cornell Avenue, but satisfactory in itself, glad that Mary should feel that alliance with the Whitings had lifted her to the high peaks oAashion, and that she should continue to burn this incense so grateful to her stepmother’s nostrils. Brave though she was. Pauline could not bring herself to paint for her stepmother a picture of things as they were. Had she done so. Mary would have felt everything crum bling around her, the edifice of Kenwood and'the regions south of Forty-second street as she had known them all her life, while beyond the wreckage and through the murk and gloom of the city’s smoke she would have seen the vision of a land of promise, the Lake Shore Drive and its long, stately line of the residences of Chicago’s very best people. But Pauline could not humble herself, she could not let Mary see her as an outsider crying out with fierce passion for admission to these new and charmed circles. "Of course, when our mourning is over we shall be going out almost entirely with the North Side set,” she said. And Mary, trustful and smiling, made this naive comment: "That will be nice," she said. And now I’ve got a plan. How would you like to go abroad this year, while we’re in mourning? I've always wanted to <ro; even those girls who boarded with me’ had been. I felt almost ashamed. You’ll want a lot of new clothes in colours when you come out. And Ive always been crazy to see Paris. \\ e 11 bias well dressed as any of them, you’ll see, Pauline.” Pauline, with unabated pride, made but one comment. "I should hope so,” in cold tones. She did not realise that at that very moment Mary wore her costume with a Parisian air that her stepdaughter would never attain. Headers must bear it in patience that nothing can make the history of the first trip abroad really startling. Perhaps it may help them a lit le to hold in their mind the image of the chrysalis, to remember that dull but necessary period which precedes every butterfly existence—and we promise to deal in due time with the two butterflies of fashion. Working in the obscuri'y of their mourning garments and of their limited acquaintance, the Whiting ladies effected certain transformations. They were no more "in society” than when they left Chicago, yet they gradually took on the air of being. They bad no friends beyond the chance companions of travel, mostly compatriots, but they fed each morning upon the title-starred columns of the Paris edition of the New York "Herald.” and they felt that in a vague way they had their part i-n this splendid European life. And as contrasted with existence in Kenwood and the regions south of For y-seeond-street it is something to say that Lady Tom Trefford was lunching at the Carl-

ton the other day when you were there; that the Comtesse du Mezidon and her brother, the Due d’Artannes. drank tea at the table next yours at Colombia's, or that the Grand Duke Alexis and Prinee Kitzhnisz were at Cannes when you were—even if you don’t know a single one of them. At this period, neither Mary nor Pauline actually thought of personal acquaintances with any of these people, nor hoped for it. Their minds were fixed on Chicago and their return. Yet they took an enormous pleasure in thus “hanging about” outside the gates of European fashion. At least Mary could see “how people did things,” and as usual "do them herself.” For example, she saw- how they dressed in Paris; she never again dressed quite as they do in Kenwood. In London she heard how English people, as distinguished from American actors imitating them, do speak; never again did she sound her r’s and a’s quite as they did in the Lakeside Euchre Club. She had learned to take a cold tub every morning, and to talk about it in public.

Really, one might have thought her in socie y if one hadn’t known. But Chicago knew, though Mary herself did not know. Pauline, dressed in the soft grey and mauve of half mourning (Paris had taught even Pauline something of how to dress, though nothing ever could teach her how not to be plain), turned her eyes at length to the city by Lake Michigan. It was all very well for her stepmother to be happy in the luxurious obscurity of their life abroad. Until her native town should recognise her, her cup was bitter at the dregs. "We’re in Chicago so little,” she was always saying. “I was at school, and since then we’ve been over here. I really scarcely feel at home there, and wlfre quite out of touch; in fact, we scarcely know people there.” She had learned to say it lightly, yet there were moments when she felt that she should scream aloud if any one ever again asked her if she knew this society woman or suggested that she must be acquainted with that cotillon leader. And inquiries about Miss Alma Lester almost drove her mad. It happened that this young woman, also of Chicago extraction, was abroad the same years as the ’Whitings. Now, Miss Lester not only knew the Lake Drive people, but was even said to have been in a box with a grand lady at the opera in New York—though this report was unauthenticat. d. Her mother had not cared for crazy-quilts, nor had her father built on Drexel Boulevard. She was in society in Chicago, if anyone ever was, and to Pauline’s ears it had come that sne enjoyed similar privileges in Washington. New York, possibly even London. The family mid never been enormously rich but in the eirly days, when social position in the new community hail been to have for the taking. Mrs. Lester had grasped it firmly, while H-’nry T. had presumably sat comfortably by

the sitting-room grate in his carpet slippers, and Emmeline had indulged in whatever folly of the needle took the place in those early days of the later crazy-quilt mania. They had not foreseen the time when a "position in society” in every town in the country would lie a thing of mystic and incalculable value, when the new democracy of the West would invent classifications that were not needed, and set its silly newspapers to the task of making everyone a snob. Pauline, the product of the new conditions, raged at the injustice her parints had done her, and Miss Alma Lester became to her like a red rag to a bull. Tin- bitterness of it all was increased by the fact that, in the uark ages preceding the Great Fire, Henry T. Wilding and Lawrence A. Lester had been partners in an enterprise which proved to be the beginning of both their fortunes. In those days Henry T. and Emmeline had a more established position than the younger Lawrence, and it was at Emmeline’s first evening party in the West Adams-street house that Mrs. Lester, a young bride, met the beau monde of the day. Since then the Whitings had faded away, througn their own neglect, into social obscurity, while Mrs. Lester —but Pauline could not think of it calmly. She felt that she could hate both Mrs. and Miss Lester, yet—oh, the degradation of it! —she must catch hold of them, cling to them—if they would let her. Pauline had rushed up to Alma with the utmost cordiality one day in Rome when Miss Lester had been talking with some friends in the palm-room of the Grand Hotel. It had not been well received. there was no denying that. There was a moment when Pauline hid been ready to dedicate her life to the humiliation of her rival, as she secretly named her. But common sense conquered. The Lesters were the only hold the Whitings had upon Chicago. Vengeance, if one may venture upon that lurid term, must wait. Alma was first to help Pauline to her natural place in Chicago, and then Pauline, to employ the phrase with a slightly altered meaning, meant to put Alma in her place. With this kindly intention Miss Whiting embarked with her stepmother in the early fall. About nine months later Maty and Pauline again sat where the patent rocker in peacock-blue crushed plush had once stood. Its place was now occupied by a deep-cushioned ehair, gay with chintz flounces. A soft June wind swayed the dainty muslin curtains to and fro and shook the leaves of the maples along Drexel Boulevard. The sun streamed across the pretty room, making the silver fixtures on the dressing-table sparkle, and lighting up the pink and white fluffiness of Mrs. Whiting's negligee. It wis a day, even in Chicago, to be idle, languorous and content now that summer had come at last. nut winter was in Pauline’s heart. While Mary idly plucked at the lace ruffles of her gown, her step-daughter, girl as if fo, action in a stiff shirtwaist, stood before her, waving a letter in the air. “It’s about that house at Lake Forest, she said; "we’ve got to decide whether we want to rent it or not. I don’t Do you?” "Well, Pauline,” was the reply. “I donlt think it’s a very pretty house, but we could take out a lot of things from here—you know this wasn’t a very pretty house, but now it is.” "If we could carry this whole house 1 wouldn’t want to go.” Pauline looked thunderous. 1 thou ff ht you did want to ’ s o I did. But I wanted to go to -Mrs. Hempy’s dinner last week. I didn’t go. Nor to the motoring thing the Lesters had at the Saddle Cycle Club.” But that isn’t the same thing,” came from Mary soothingly. "It is.” Pauline answered. “I didn’t go to those things because I wasn’t ask ed. \\ e’re not asked to Lake Forest.” “Well. I guess this is a free count ry- ” V h- v y° u keep on saying ’guess’? I think it’s so dead common,” interrupted Pauline—and then went on with no pause for an answer: “You know what I mean. No one especially wants us to come out there for the summer—at least nobody wants us that we want to have want us. We must face facts.” “It seems to me you’re always telling me to face facts.” Mary’s voice had a plaintive wail in it. “No one wants us in Lake Forest,” repeated Pauline, “any more than they do here."

“People have asked you out a good deal. Pauline.” “Have they?” inquired the girl satirically. “Oh, mother, you don’t want me to go over the history of last year!” Mary did not, it appeared, nor will the readers of this tale. Some of them may perhaps themselves have attempted to climb the ladder, and can supply for themselves the depressing details of the Whitings’ winter. “We are just as good as any of them,” philosophised Pauline profoundly; “we have got as much money as most of them, and we’re ready to spend it. But I suppose it’s no fun being in society unless you have some one to keep out.” “Of course, I think myself that the Lesters have ” “Don’t speak of them to me!” Pauline strode fiercely across the room and sat down opposite Mary. “You saw through them, I hope. Alma introduced me to just enough people so that there would be an audience to see us fall down. What is their old social position, anyhow? 1 wonder if they’ve really got it in New York, or in London, as they say. Oh, if ever I get a chanee ” Pauline brooded gloomily, and the stepmother and stepdaughter sat a moment in silence, which the former broke. “Well, we had a pleasant winter, anyhow. I’m sure I never had a pleasanter.” “I guess you haven’t,” retorted Pauline. Mary, tremblingly on the verge of tears, for a moment lifted her eyes to her stepdaughter. “I mean I expect you haven’t-—not in Cornell Avenue.” “I’m sorry I can’t help you, Pauline. I wish I’d been fashionable.” “I’m sure I wish you had.” Mary was now quite in tears, but one might have observed her back stiffen a little at Pauline’s tone. Pauline probably did not see. “It makes it much harder for me, having to get two people everywhere.” Mary lifted her head; the tears had ceased to flow. “Don’t forget, Pauline,” she said, with a note not usually in her voice, “that you’ve run this show yourself. 1 don’t, for my part, think you were always right. You’re so proud that you will pretend we’re already the swellest of the swell when we aren’t. I think, sometimes, if we were honester and quicker to take advantage of everything that turns up we might get on better. But goodness knows I never interfered; I allowed you to go enough places by yourself, and I never went places by myself.” “I didn’t know you were asked,” said Pauline. Mary rose, and went swiftly across the room, her dainty pink and white trailing after her gracefully. She took a note from a compartment in a pretty Sheraton desk, and then, with it in her hand, stood before Pauline. “Mrs. Hempy asked me to dinner and she didn’t ask you,” she said, “and I didn’t go—neither did I tell you because I thought you’d feel hurt. But if she asks me again I shall.” Pauline seized the note and read. “But you ought to have gone!” she cried, and then her tears began to flow, from mixed motives, perhaps. Mary seated herself in her chair and stared out across the lawn and the waving trees- Finally she spoke. “I didn't mean to be cross, Pauline. I’m sorry things haven’t gone as you wanted them to go here. Well, you’re just a prophet without honour, that’s all. I’d like to go abroad again. Chicago isn’t the only place. I’m sure I always knew all the nicest people on Cornell Avenue, and I believe the world’s about the same everywhere. And I’ve learned a good deal this winter. You come abroad and let mo hei have a try.” Pauline stole to her side, feeling dimly that she possessed a new and unrealised asset. Mary put her arm around her stepdaughter’s shoulder. “Mother, dear,” began the girl, in an aceent of unwonted tenderness, “I’m afraid I’ve been selfish. I want you in the future to enjoy yourself as much as possible. You’re young and pretty and ” “Oh, that’s all right, Pauline!” said Mary, and with a laugh her natural gaiety returned. She rose and crossed the room with the pleasant undulating movement of our national dance. Intelligent readers ara asked to admire and note the eafceWalk. for later other audiences, far more fashionable

and important, will welcome it with enthusiasm. Mrs Whiting’s voice piped up with the cheerful words of a new and popular song: “You’ve been a good little girl.” she -ring; “so come along with me!” Pauline dabbed at her eyes jerkily anil then " “I'll come along,” she said, “and I’ll never come back to this old town until I can come back and show these people! Oh. I understand why American girls go abroad and live there and marry there!” “Well,” said her stepmother, “perhaps you’ll marry there.” “I'd almost like to marry one of their old titles. I believe I would- That would show these Chicago people and that Alma Lester ” "Well,” said her stepmother, soothingly. “perhaps you will, if that’s what you want. I like to have people get what they want in this world. And I promised your father you should have your chance.” In a more subdued tone she sang again her little song with its lilting refrain. Pauline may not have been a very “good little girl,” but she was de fined to “come along.” 111. "Hilda,” said Laurie Mars.on to Lady Tom TrcfTord, as he helped himself a second time from a dish of the small red mullet which are so plentiful in the Mediterranean and make so excellent a dish for the midday breakfast of France—“ Hilda, I’m bringin’ two ladies to lunch to-morrow.” "Ain’t it enough,” queried Tommy Treiford —Lord Thomas, to give him his due—“that you lunch here almost every day yourself, Laurie?” "You oughtn’t to he surprised, Tommy, that I come so often. You’ve the best cook in Cannes —have some more of your own fish, do! —and your villa is much the nearest to my beastly lodgings. You ought to be very glad — being Hilda’s second cousin and having known her since she was a disagreeable little child in the nursery—that I don't want to make love to her, but fetch a id carry for her, and altogether brigh.en her life considerably.” "Who is it you want to bring, Laurie!” asked Lady Tom. "I'd give two to one they’re America ns," grunted her husband. "They are,” assented Mr Marston, cheerfully. "You and Hilda keep this house full up with Americans, especially widows. They run in and out of it like rabbits in a warren.” "They all begin their London career at Cannes,” philosophised Mr Marston. Tn this house,” said Tommy. "Well, I'm sure you men all like them,” said Lady l oin. "That’s why I have them about. They’re no trouble.” “I like some of them,” admitted her husband. "But that last one Laurie landed us with was spotty. And I never did like red hair.” "Oh, American widows vary,” mused Mr Marston with judicial calm, “but 1 think they are going to run very well this season.” "What's this one like?” queried his host. "< >h, very pretty, indeed. And a sweet, inexperienced flower of the West.” "My eye!” said Tommy. Expressed informally, it was yet an observation profound enough. Lady Hilda understood. “That means Tommy thinks she’ll do." she interpreted. "But yon said there were two of them. Not two widows? I'hey don’t generally hunt in couples.” "A mother and daughter.” “<»h!” said Tommy. "Mother and stepdaughter. They're about the same age.” A sigh of relief came from his lord ship. “What is it matre pulehra filia pulchrior?” Laurie Marston lifted his hands as if in despair, and poured himself out a stiflish drink of whisky with less soda than was usual with him. "Oh. the daughter!" he said. “The daughter’s a pill!” By this description the intelligent reader will, if he has not already done so, recognise Pauline, but if is hoped that any sorrow caused by its harshness will be more than atoned for by the pleasure caused by the

realisation that Mary, so delightfully described as a sweet prairie flower, has at last got her foot upon the ladder. It was never meant that the present narrative should lack its moral lessons. And this may be a suitable place to hint that not the least of its truths is that a new world often looks at things with new eyes, and that many a pretty, rich, good-natured lady who is not appreciated for her real merits in Chicago, New York, Chillicothe or Paw Paw, Michigan, may sometimes easily make her way in the equally important town of London. It is becoming the usual thing for aspirants for honours in the approaching London season to run the winter trial heats in Cannes, where society is more informal, and where there is a constant need of new people who will organise parties to run over to Monte Carlo and will pay for extravagant dinners there at Giro’s. Instinct and diligent perusal of “The Paris Daily Guide to Snobbishness” led Mary to hit upon the Riviera. Chance had sent her and Pauline down from Paris in the train with Air Laurence Marston. That young gentleman, quite out of the kindness of his heart, had rescued Togo, Mrs. Whiting’s Japane e pug, from a confused and dangerous situation among the legs and feet of three French porters at the Avignon station. Mary, who had always liked dogs, had observed of late how truly fashionable it was to have one’s life bound up in onq, so she felt justified in making her thanks to the unknown young Englishman warm. At lunch Togo’s rescuer was placed by the conducteur at the Whitings’ table, whereupon he apologised for his intrusion with admirable politeness but no apparent intention of leaving. To do him justice Mr Marston had at this stage no motives beyond a desire to vary the monotony of the journey. When he learned that his companions were bound for Cannes he felt his interest increase. When, the second day after his arrival, he discovered his friends upon the terrace of Cannes’ newest and mo-t ridiculously expensive hostelry, and noted the fact that Mrs Whitings’ gown was quite the prettiest, and her parasol the most ravishingly llully there, he felt, as he said to the ladies when he approached them, that they were already old friends. Everybody on the terrace was having tea. but not everybody had a well-dressed young man in white flannels- As he approached, Mary had noticed that Mr Marston lifted his hat to two other groups, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she could now see a woman removing some books from a chair as if to prepare it for occupancy . It was not a moment to hesitate. Had Mrs Whiting hesitated—so much in this world is due merely to chance—perhaps this story might never have been written. Fortunately for the writer—and he hopes for the reader, too —she took the plunge promptly. “Won’t you sit down and have some tea? We’re just going to order some. I’m being informal, because we don’t know you—or you us—at all. But you English expect us Americans to do odd things.” “This is a very nice thing; I don't know about it’s being odd,” replied Laurie, sinking comfortably into a chair and explaining to a waiter that he wanted toast —not and cream —not merely milk. He did not have the air of thinking the episode especially odd. Pauline’s sallow cheek paled. For her ideas of correct behaviour might have been taken straight from some book of etiquette, or from the “answers to correspondents” column of some American newspaper. She knew that one should not invite to tea young men to whom one has not been introduced. And she felt poignantly as well that they did not know to what social sphere their unknown friend might belong. Did he, figuratively speaking, come from the North Side of London, or from its Cornell Avenue in the suburbs? In the first case, what must he think of them? Tn the second, what must they do to rid themselves of an unde-irable encumbrance? Tn an agony of mind, she was meditating how she might best, a little later bring home a reproof to her stepmother, when upon her ear Mr Martson's conversation began to have some effect.” “The hotel is going to do well this season, I should say. You’ve got all

the smartest people here. Who is that lady? That one with that absurd feather boa that makes her look like a cockatoo with indigestion? Oh, that’s a very dear friend of mine? That’s Mrs Alfred Peignton. I must introduce you to her some time. She knows everybody in the world, and there’s no one who would be so useful to you. You have heard of her, of course.” “Yes, indeed,” broke in Pauline. Had she not a thousand times read in the “New York Herald” that Mrs Peignton had been seen “driving in Bondstreet, looking so well, in mouse-grey,” or “at the Carlton, wearing some pearls.” The unknown young man in white flannels must be all right. Pauline made his tea, which she was preparing at the moment, exceptionally sweet with sugar and unsually rich with cream, and straightway bent all her arts to his subjugation. Alas that one should have to record that the only result was that, the next day, Laurie should have described her to Tommy Trefford and Ladv Tom as “a pill!” “Then you’re not planning to marry that heiress?” asked Tommy—we have returned to lunch at the Villa des Acacias. “Do I ever marry them?” demanded Laurie, with an aggrieved air. “No, but why don’t you?” persisted his host- “How do you make it pay?” “As if I ever made anything pay! Don’t let’s discuss my miserable, squalid poverty!” Lady Tom ro-e from the table and lit a cigarette. “You do yourself most uncommon well, Laurie, for a man who hasn’t a penny.” “Oh, there are pickings!” said Mr Marston. “I did very well for a while with that moor-car agency last year. The company allowed me ten per cent., and I got some of those merry bounding South Africans and one of my Americans to buy. And all it cost me was to ask ’em to lunch at the Carlton to meet somebody or other.” “That time last year when I luneh-

ed with you and those Australian horrors ” began Lady Tom. “My dear Hilda, I told you at the time it was to help me out of a hole and that you needn’t know them afterward. And it was a case of a motor and an electric brougham as well that time—l netted a hundred anti sixty-five pounds counting out the lunch.” “Was it a decent lunch, Hilda?” asked the lady’s husband. “Gave the brutes champagne!” Mr Marston took the reply out of the lady’s mouth. “A hundred and sixty-five!” said she in amazement. “And that’s the profit of one lunch! I don’t see why you need be poor, Laurie.” “That sort of thing was too good to last. When women began to push motors I went out of the business. You know that soap woman who’s got the Utterfield’s house in South Audleystreet? Well, I should have got her to buy one of my cars when-—what do you think? Lady Greyforde wrote to her—she’d never in the world met her, mind you—and said that she heard she was thinking of starting a car, and Lady Greyforde was interested in a new make, and wouldn’t the soap woman come to tea on Thursday to talk it over? Well, you may imagine the woman would jolly well have bought fifteen ears to get asked to Greyforde House- I call it pretty rotten low! The Greyfordes have got seventy thousand a year and she might do what she can to keep society decent. Well, the King said it was pretty thick when he heard about it. I wish he’d tell Florence Greyforde so.” “Somebody will,” said Lady Tom. “The King has his own make of motors, too,” she added thoughtfully. “Oh, yes,” as-ented Laurie. “But he perfectly well has all the money he wants now. And not a debt, I hear. Wish I could say as much!” “Of course, I think it’s ‘disky,’ but still, if you’re in need of it, why don’t you take a commission on introducing your fair Americans? You’re always running some one or other of them.”

'‘Couldn’t do ’em well enough to charge good prices. No, I really do it because it amuses me and because 1 like -them mostly. I love seeing how they take London and how it takes them. And generally they do extremely well, and, as far as I'm concerned, they pay their shot by the dinners and the champagne I consume chez dies. AS actually doing a business in introducing social aspirants and making them pay through the nose for it, I leave that to self-supporting women.” “To Edith Peignton, for example,” Baid Lady Tom with a hearty, brisk air which people assume sometimes when they tackle subjects that they know are not quite welcome. ‘•Poor dear Mrs Peignton hasn’t a penny; everybody knows that! I’m sure I hope she gets something out of the women she earts about Ixmdon.” “Why waste time in hoping, Laurie?” Lady Tom smiled sweetly. “We all know she docs. Why, poor dear Edith hasn't lived in that house of hers in Curzon-street for ten years except out of season. It’s always let.” “Always to Americans,” put in Tommy. “And always at an outrageous price,” added his wife. “I hope so,” replied Laurie. “I think Edith Peignton is a dear ” “You ought to,” said Lady Tom, who had now —it is to be regretted that one must say it—arrived at the portion of the discussion which really interested her—“ You ought to; Edith is certainly very, very fond of you.” Mr Marston —has it been mentioned? —was only twenty-four. Me flushed a little. “Nonsense,” he said. “Of course, she’s a charming woman ” “And you're a charming boy. Oh, I don’t say so myself, Laurie dear; I'm only quoting Mrs Peignton.” “It seems a pity, Hilda, that a woman as much older’ than a man can’t be friendly with him without people talking.” Lady Tom strolled toward the window and looked out toward the sea. Then, turning quickly about: “Don’t be a silly boy, Laurie, when I rag you about things. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m sure I think it’s very nice of you, turning these millionaires over to Edith. You plan that she’s to run them in town next season, don’t you ?” “There isn’t any one wlio’d do it better, is there?” “No one. So bring your Mrs ” “Mrs and Miss Whiting.” “Mrs and Miss Whiting along’ for some lunch to-morrow. I’m quite game to give them a leg up if you want me to. Only, just so that Edith sha’n’t be jealous, you’d better let Tommy talk to the pretty one.” “Righto!” cried Lord Thomas in agreement and in the highest spirits. Mr Marston seemed sulky, and in this condition we must leave him. It is hoped that this glimpse of the fashionable world—all three at lunch. in the .Villa des Acacias were of an unquestionable position — will have served in some measure to explain the rather mixed motives which were at the back of the delightful welcome that Cannes seemed to extend to our heroines.

In Cannes, in fact, history began—our history, that is, Mary’s history. And from this point on each fragment of it would seem to any one with a proper reverence for smart society worth recording. We cannot, however, linger over lunch at the Tommy Treffords’, nor over tea with Laurie Marston at the golf elub, though at the latter place our ladies from Chicago stood within twenty feet of a Russian Grand Duke when he missed a perfectly easy put, and heard him comment upon his own failure with a thoroughly Grand Ducal oath. However delightful these episodes, they are but episodes. It was only when Mrs Alfred Peignton, duly introduced by Mr Laurence Marston, consented to take tea with Mrs and Miss Whiting on the terrace of their hotel that our heroines came really at close quarters with their opportunity. It must not be supposed that the ladies Whiting had been subjected to no investigation whatever. dust because one is young and pretty and appears to be rich one cannot necessarily make the acquaintance in the Riviera train of a young man who will- introduce you into the best society of the “coast of azure,” as the railway posters love to call it. If one could, it is to be feared that the Lyons station at Paris would be crowded every day and the train itself almost mobbed by lovely young American women. Such compatriots of the Whitings as were in Cannes were at once asked for information about them. “Chicago, you say,” was Mrs Ogden Van Ostrander’s reply. “My dear Mrs Peignton, I’m from New York. This Mrs Whiting may be the leader of fashion in Chicago—probably is. I shouldn’t be likely to know.” “Whiting, Whiting,” mused her busband who sat near, disconsolately thinking of the Union Club in New York and meditating upon the European lack of cocktails while his wife drank tea, “if it is Henry T. Whiting ” “Henry T., that is it!” .-aid Airs Peignton—“was it, rather. She’s a widow.” “Is he dead? I’d forgotten,” went on Mr Van Ostrander. “And now she’s making his money fly. I suppose?” “Like those vulgar Westerners!” commented his wife sniflingly. “Perhaps she waited till >ie lied, at least.” For a moment Mr Van Ostrander had seemed to contemplate philosrnhically his wife’s modest morning gown of real lace and her simple little lorgnette chain of a hundred baroque pearls of almost the largest size, before he permitted himself this dark observation. Then he turned to Mrs Peignton. “I knew Henry Whiting. He was an important man in business out there. He and I were directors together once on the board of the Peoria and Milwaukee Air Line.” “What was that?” asked Mts Peignton with a bright, brisk air. “A rival Marconi system?” She had found American men a little difficult in conversation sometimes, but she was not a woman to despair even when they would talk business. “Railroad,” chuckled Mr Van Ostrander. “I’m out, but the Whiting estate must hold a big chunk of the stock still. Can’t tell you how they’re quoted socially out there, but the money should be all right.”

Mrs Peignton settled her skirt with almost a long breath of relief. “They seem charming, but then,” she added gracefully, “I’m so fond of you Americans—l find you almost all charming” This sentiment she repeated with a pretty smile at the tea-drinking with Mary and Pauline to which the reader’s attention must now be directed. “Most people at home think you English don’t really like us,” said Mary. “We don't like all of you—not the common, vulgar, horrid ones ” “The kind you meet travelling. 1 hate them,” put in Pauline, almost in auger. “We’ve been met travelling,” said Mary with a laugh, while Mrs Peignton shot a glance through her half-closed eyes at the girl. "We like the right kind. I think the right kind are about the same everywhere—don't you? At any rate, 1 adore Americans, especially the women. 1 think they're so pretty and so well dressed—oh, how Englishwomen do dress!—ami so amusing. I'm rather noted for my partiality,” she rattled on. “I don’t suppose there’s a ‘woman in London who lias done more than I have to make Americans known in society there.” Mary and Pauline almost gasped. Indeed, no social training could be expected to produce a poise which could be maintained in the face of this sudden apparent opening of the gates of Paradise. a "You will be coming to town this spring, 1 suppose, won’t you?” Mary smiled, still weak at the knees with a feeling that it was all too good to be true. Me thought of it,” she managed to get out. Mrs. Peignton sighed delicately. “How sorry I am,” she said, “that I probably can’t be there.” The gates of Paradise swung to, rose faded from the sky and all was gray. Pauline gulped down a cup of scalding tea, and Mary nervously twirled her chiffon sunshade. There was a moment’s silence. Mrs. Peignton’s eye rested upon the blue of the sea shining through the dark green of orange trees, and she smiled placidly. Then, as if to belie the smile, she sighed again, daintily. “I'm so disappointed,” she said. “Not so much as we are,” blurted Pauline. The smile returned to the Englishwoman’s face. “I hope you’ll change your mind,” said Mary. “Why ” she hesitated. “Why don’t I come?” replied Mrs. Peignton. turning to them with a brisker air. “Because, my dear, I can’t afford it. You Americans always think that we talk extraordinarily freely about money affairs. I might as well talk freely about mine, my dear, for any one and every one in London could tell you how badly off I am. I 've just nothing really except my 'house in Curzon-street. I hate to sell that, because it’s a charming house, and because it’s got in it all sorts of family things of the Peignton, and I shouldn’t know where to put. them. I have to let it because I can’t afford to live in it. If I get a good let for it during the season 1 go into a smaller house and 1 can just manage to make both

ends meet. If I don't let it I simply have to go to stay dully in tin: country with an old aunt.” “And haven’t you rented it for this year?” asked Mrs. Whiting. “I had a very good oiler just beforo I came out here, two thousand for the season, but I didn’t take it; 1 didn’t like the people. I dare say l’iu a fool, but 1 do let sentiment interfere. I like to have people who will appreciate and lovo my things as I do. And I never get over a funny, old-fashioned idea that my tenants are my guests. So 1 try always to get people I know. Until this year I’ve always had the greatest luck and the most charming people—a good many of your compatriots, by the way. There’s Mrs. MaeAliister—she’s got a big house in Grosvenor Square now, and a perfectly definite position in London —she took my house her first season. She liked it so much, and London bo much—l really believe 1 started her knowing people—that 1 don’t believe she’ll ever gs back now. But I mustn't talk a limit my own affairs,” she went on with a pretty apologetic smile, “but about yours. What are your plans ?” Mary deliberated a moment. Somehow. she thought she began vaguely to see “how people did things.” With her the next step was, as usual, to do them herself. “If I Uhought Pauline and I would like London I should take a house. Would yours ? But I don’t suppose you know us well enough.” “My dear,” screamed Mrs. Peignton with a pretty little air of surprise, “I should love it! Would you think of it? It’s really the sweetest house.” “What did you say the rent was!” asked Pauline. “Oh, you would deal with the agent about that! I can give you his address. He docs all my business—l’m such a fool about it. But I know fthat it ought to bring about—l think about twenty-two hundred.” “Didn’t you say two thousand !” queried Pauline. There spoke the daughter of Hcnrv T.! “Did ? I I’m so stupid about such things. But it is twenty-two or twentythree, I know. And the agent insists mi half of it being in advance—l remember that.” “We must think about it. If we only knew people in London and were sure we would like it ” mused Mary. “Oh, I can guarantee that!” .exclaimed Mrs. Peignton. "You can’t quite put it into the lease, can you?” said Mary wiAh a naive and smiling air.

“No,” said Mrs. Peignton, taking up the joke, "but it could br_* understood between friends.” • .«.*•. If one may anticipate history a little, it will perhaps interest the reader to know of another proposition made to Mrs. Whiting on her arrival in London. Jt may even help any who are climbing, and do not have the good luck to run across a Mr. Marston or a Mrs. Peignton. Our heroine was waited upon by an irreproachable young man in clothes of excessively fashionable cut who explained to iher, without wasting much time in preliminaries, that he represented the Bond-street Bureau. This institution, presided over by a gentleman whom Mary later was constantly to meet in society, offered to "take her on” for four hundred pounds a month, or one thousand pounds for the season. It, in return, agreed to furnish the necessary introductions to put her into society, arrange and manage all parties and audit the bills for them—also attend to all press-work and see that paragraphs and portraits appeared wherever they would do itie most good. The address can lie furnished upon application (please inclose stamped envelope for reply!),, and the Bureau is uncommonly serviceable. But our heroins felt that she could tell her visitor that she had all her arrangements made, though she discreetly refrained from mentioning any names. “I’m glad we’ve decided to take that house, niotjier,” said Pauline late that night, after their talk with Mrs. Peignton, when the ladies, in comfortable peignoirs, were discussing the events of the day. "But it seems so funny, somehow. Of course, 1 believe she’s asking us twice the usual rent for it.”

“If she wasn't I wouldn’t take it, Pauline.” “Do you think it is the sort of thing people dot” "Do you think it isn’t?” asked Mary.' “No,” said Paulipe, “I suppose not. I think you’ve wonderful to dare to do it all of a sudden like that. But buying one’s way seems kind of horrid to me.” “Goodness gracious, Pauline, it is horrid! Do you think 1 don’t know that?” replied her stepmother with animation. “Yet 1 remember once at school —it was in Miss Peters’ room, 1 remember, the B Primary—there was a girl who wanted to get asked to join a club of six girls who used to bring their lunch in baskets every Thursday and got permission to stay in and eat it, during the noon recess, in a stuffy room, instead of going home for a decent meal—-that is children’s idea of pleasure*. Mell, you know how wild school-dhildren used to be over making exchanges?” “I went to a private school- ” began Pauline. “And I didn’t,” said Mary. “But what I’m trying to prove to you is that things are about the same everywhere. Well, this girl took an old slate of mine, cracked down the middle, in exchange for a new’ pen-box and three sponges and a perfectly good black rubber ink-well that closed with a. snap. She got into the club. Another girl, who didn’t, started a story that she had offered’to buy all our old chewing-gum, after we’d used it, for a eent. a lump. ’ “Oh, mother, how disgusting!” screamed Pauline. “ “Yes, but it wasn’t so—not that part. She was a nice girl; we all liked her very much —after we had let her into the club. And I’m not sure I liked her any the less because I’d got a pen-box and the ink-well out of her.” IV. The Mediterranean turned, if possible, a brighter blue, the sky a softer azure. As spring advanced, gentler winds, bringing grateful warmth from the distant shores of Africa, coaxed open even the most reluctant rosebuds. And Mary and Pauline still climbed. Cannes is not London, as Laurie Marston once thought it worth while to remind our heroines. But it is Cannes,- at least, and,'as he could not but admit, very much worth while. Mary herself went a little deeper into the situation when she said: “All the English know who the other English are; all the French who the other French are, so none of them feels that it matters very much whether they know- who we are or not.” Of course, for a minute or two people remembered that the Whiting ladies were acquaintances of Mr Marston’s, acquired in haphazard fashion, and they shrugged their shoulders. But English people find life too short to trouble much about the original source of introduction, provided the people introduced are presentable, pretty, amusing or rich. Alary did what she could to confirm the belief that she and Pauline possessed all these qualities. And occasionally the quality of her tact quite deserves recording. It will not be easy to match, for naive charm, the story of the Due d’Artannes and the two pearl necklaces. It was shortly after they made the acquaintance of this handsome young gentleman that some one repeated to Alary a remark of his as to the uncertainty one felt as to whether Americans one met travelling really had any money at home or not. The uncertainty did not, however, keep-him from • shall we say prospecting? For the. next afternoon his card was brought to Mrs Whiting. In live minutes she came down, and laiely has that staircase seen a prettier sight than she made, daintily dressed in white, and carrying in either hand a pearl and diamond necklace of incredible beauty- and expensiveness. Nothing could have been more fortunate than this visit, she assured her guest. He had such excellent taste; he could help her to decide which of these lovelythings was the lovelier. Ihe. Duke’s dark eyes glowed with appreciation—o' things generally, and in the end ho urged her to keep both. But she modestly pleaded poverty, and mentioned the' price of the one they both inclined to. It was a considerable sum, and when he left both hostess and guest felt that the pleasant period of tea time had not been spent in vain. It need cause no surprise that Alary nnd Pauline soon began to be seen about, and that “those new Americana”

was a description sufficiently definite for most people. larurie Marston, a saint, as Airs Peignton said, in the way he fagged for other people, assisted them in selecting a motor-car, of a make which he knew to be absolutely reliable. Lady Tom and Mary’ would, often take a couple of Hilda’s young men over to Afonte Carlo to play a little and to lunch. All Mary’s traditional knowledge of the relations between the sexes would have led her to expect that on these occasions the gentlemen should foot the bills. And, indeed, on the first expedition a certain Lord Remerton settled the account without turning a hair. But when, on the return trip, they had

deposited their two escorts, Lady Tom corrected that. “My dear,” shesaid with a long breath, “we ought never to have allowed Remerton to pay for lunch.” ‘ ■ - “But would Lord Remerton ——” began Alary. “Just hand them your purse and make them pay.” ■ Alary abandoned . unhesitatingly the principles of Cornell Avenue, and the golden shower of the late Henry T.'s fortune began to fall even more freely upon Cannes. (Concluded in next issue.)