ents of her life as a diplomat's wife, a generation ago, in
Europe. The old composer of her famous cradle-song shared with the
publisher of her "Letters from an Attache's Wife," and the prima-donna
she had discovered and educated, a merry little Italian table where her
musician son made the proud fourth. A party of old pupils from the
convent school where she had spent a year surprised the room with the
valedictory verses she had written for the class, and at her
bridesmaid's table only one was lacking--the saucy maid-of-honour,
Evelyn, of thirty years ago!

A goodly fraction of what was just about to be known as the famous
"Four Hundred" of New York society chattered and stared at the poets
and novelists from Boston; and, for the sake of future memories,
Wilhelmina's children and the olive twins from Florence gazed curiously
from under their governesses' wings at the lights and roses and jewels
and tinted glass that made the great room a scented fairyland to their
round eyes.

At every table was a vacant chair, and to each of these she moved in
turn for the space of one of the courses of the elaborate dinners of
the end of the nineteenth century, a majestic figure in black velvet,
frosted to the waist with her grandmother's wonderful point-lace, her
shoulders, firm and creamy still, twinkling with her father's wedding
diamonds, her neck soft under her husband's birthday pearls.

It was said of her on that night that she was the one person in the big
room who could have been perfectly at ease at every table there, and
the pride of the children as she took her nuts and coffee among them
was delightful to witness.

"You have, indeed, lived every moment of a rich life, Signora," said
the composer to her, in Italian, as he sat again after their graceful
bows on the rendering of his now almost classic lullaby by the great
singer. "Is it not so?"

"It may be, _Maestro_, but there is, after all things, and for all
people, a rest at last," she answered gravely.

Her son, who was dressing them one of his inimitable salads, looked up
sharply at this, though the others only smiled.

"And you start on your travels, it appears, after this triumph?" the
_Maestro_ inquired.

"To-morrow," she said.

"And may we know..."

"I go alone," she answered, smiling.

About each of her ecstatic granddaughters' necks she gravely clasped
her pearl or diamond chains, as they stood at the foot of the stairs in
her brownstone house