hen she remembered his confessed
ignorance and laughed.

With such reservations as she deemed advisable, she sketched briefly for
him one of those amazing careers so typical of the swiftly changing
social conditions of America.

As she talked, he visualized her father, keen, restless, resolute, a
money-hunter, who had bred out of a few dollars many dollars, and out of
many dollars an overwhelming fortune; her mother, a woman of clean,
fine, shrewd, able New England stock (the Tyro, being of the old
America, knew the name at once); and the daughter, born to moderate
means, in the Middle West, raised luxuriously on the basis of waxing
wealth, educated abroad and in America in a school which shields its
pupils from every reality of life and forces their growth in a hothouse
atmosphere specially adapted to these human orchids, and then presented
as a finished product for the acceptance of the New York circle which,
by virtue of much painful and expensive advertising in the newspapers,
calls itself Society.

Part of this she told him, qualifying the grossness of the reality by
her own shrewd humor; part he read between the lines of the
autobiography.

What she did not reveal to him was that she was the most flattered and
pampered heiress of the season; courted by the great and shining ones,
fawned on by the lesser members of the charmed circle, the pet and
plaything of the Sunday newspapers--and somewhat bored by it all.

The siege of society had been of farcical ease. Not her prospective
millions nor her conquering loveliness, either of which might eventually
have gained the entree for her, would have sufficed to set her on the
throne. Shrewd social critics ascribed her effortless success to what
Lord Guenn called her "You-be-d----d" air.

The fact is, there was enough of her New England mother in Cecily to
keep her chin up. She never fawned. She never truckled. She was direct
and honest, and free from taint of snobbery, and a society perhaps the
most restlessly, self-distrustfully snobbish in the world marveled and
admired and accepted. Gay, high-spirited, kind in her somewhat
thoughtless way, clever, independent of thought and standard, with a
certain sweet and wistful vigor of personality, Cecily Wayne ruled,
almost as soon as she entered; ruled--and was lonely.

For the Puritan in her demanded something more than her own circle gave
her. And, true to the Puritan character, she wanted her price. That
price was h