st frown
of perplexity. "You're not going to have theatricals, I hope." She
thought it was going pretty far to receive company Sunday afternoon,
and if there was to be anything more she was ready to take her stand
now.

Charmian gave a shout of laughter. "I wish we were. Then I could be
_natural_. But I mean, what are you going to be: very gentle and mild
and sweet and shrinking; or very philosophical and thoughtful; or very
stately and cold and remote? You know you have to be _something_. Don't
you always plan out the character you want them to think you?"

"No," said Cornelia, driven to her bluntest by the discomfort she felt
at such a question, and the doubt it cast her into.

Charmian looked at her gloomily. "You strange creature!" she murmured.
"But I love you," she added aloud. "I simply idolize you!"

Cornelia said, half-laughing, "Don't be ridiculous," and pulled herself
out of the embrace which her devotee had thrown about her. But she
could not help liking Charmian for seeming to like her so much.

XVIII.

They still had some time with Mrs. Maybough, when they went back to her
before any one else came; Cornelia could see that her features were
rather small and regular, and that her hair was that sort of elderly
blond in color which makes people look younger than they are after they
have passed a certain age. She was really well on in the thirties when
she went out to Leadville to take charge of Charmian Maybough's
education from the New England town where she had always lived, and
ended by marrying Charmian's father. At that time Andrew Maybough had
already made and lost several fortunes without great depravation from
the immoralities of the process; he remained, as he had always been, a
large, loosely good-natured, casual kind of creature, of whom it was a
question whether he would not be buried by public subscription, in the
end; but he died so opportunely that he left the widow of his second
marriage with the income from a million dollars, which she was to share
during her lifetime with the child of his first. Mrs. Maybough went
abroad with her step-daughter, and most of the girl's life had been
spent in Europe.

There was a good deal of Dresden in their sojourn, something of
Florence, necessarily a little of Paris; it was not altogether wanting
in London, where Mrs. Maybough was presented at court. But so far as
definitively materialized society was concerned, Europe could not be
said to h