eeks
like the beak of an old eagle--an indomitable old eagle. Many women of
sixty-eight had worn far better, but looks need care, spurred by
vanity, and she had a profound contempt for both. No doubt if she had
made a few of the well-known feminine concessions would have looked at
least ten years younger than her age, for she had never had a day's
illness: eight lyings-in were not, in her case, to be counted as
exceptions. No doubt, thought Clavering, as he turned to greet her,
she had thought it quite enough to be imposing.

She certainly looked imposing tonight in spite of her old-fashioned
corsets and her iron-gray hair arranged in flat rolls and puffs on the
precise top of her head, for although flesh had accumulated lumpily on
her back, her shoulders were still unbowed, her head as haughtily
poised as in her youth, and the long black velvet gown with yellow old
point about the square neck (the neck itself covered, like the throat,
with net), and falling over her hands, became her style if not the
times.

"Well, Lee!" she said drily. "I suppose when you got my note you
thought I had gone bug-house, as my fastidious granddaughter Janet
would express it. But that is the way I felt and that is the way I
feel at the present moment."

"Dear Lady Jane! Whatever it is, here I am to command, as you see.
There is no engagement I wouldn't have broken----"

"You are a perfect dear, and if I were forty years younger I should
marry you. However, we'll come to that later. I want to talk to you
about that damnable little Janet first--we'll have to go in now."

When they were seated at a small table at one end of the immense
dining-room she turned to the butler and said sharply:

"Get out, Hawkins, and stay out except when we can't get on without
you." And Hawkins, whom a cataclysm would not have ruffled after
forty-five years in Mrs. Oglethorpe's service, vanished.

"Jim said he had a talk with you about Janet, and that you advised him
to spank her," she said. "Well, he did."

"What?" Clavering gave a delighted grin. "I never believed he'd do
it."

"Nor I. Thought his will had grown as flabby as his body. But when
she stood up to him and with a cool insolence, which she may or may not
have inherited from me, or which may be merely part and parcel of the
new manner, and flung in his face a good deal more than he knew
already, and asked him what he was going to do about it, he turned her
over his knee and t