secretly declaring her to
be a worse one.

On the part of Mrs. Conyers, the motives which she brought to the
association presented nothing that must be captured and brought
down from the heights, she was usually to be explained by mining
rather than mounting. Whatever else she might not have been, she
was always ore; never rainbows.

Throughout bird and animal and insect life there runs what is
recognized as the law of protective assimilation. It represents
the necessity under which a creature lives to pretend to be
something else as a condition of continuing to be itself. The
rose-colored flamingo, curving its long neck in volutions that
suggest the petals of a corolla, burying its head under its wing
and lifting one leg out of sight, becomes a rank, marvellous
flower, blooming on too slight a stalk in its marshes. An insect
turns itself into one of the dried twigs of a dead stick. On the
margin of a shadowed pool the frog is hued like moss--greenness
beside greenness. Mrs. Conyers availed herself of a kind of
protective assimilation when she exposed herself to the environment
of Mrs. Meredith, adopting devices by which she would be taken for
any object in nature but herself. Two familiar devices were
applied to her habiliments and her conversations. Mrs. Meredith
always dressed well to the natural limit of her bountiful years;
Mrs. Conyers usually dressed more than well and more than a
generation behind hers. On occasions when she visited Rowan's
unconcealed mother, she allowed time to make regarding herself
almost an honest declaration. Ordinarily she Was a rose nearly
ready to drop, which is bound with a thread of its own color to
look as much as possible like a bud that is nearly ready to open.

Her conversations were even more assiduously tinged and fashioned
by the needs of accommodation. Sometimes she sat in Mrs.
Meredith's parlors as a soul sick of the world's vanities, an urban
spirit that hungered for country righteousness. During a walk one
day through the gardens she paused under the boughs of a weeping
willow and recited, "Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition--"
She uniformly imparted to Mrs. Meredith the assurance that with her
alone she could lay aside all disguises.

This morning she alighted from her carriage at the end of the
pavement behind some tall evergreens. As she walked toward the
house, though absorbed with a serious purpose, she continued to be
as observant of every