perilous as that of an invading army without a base of supplies. She
used up everything too quickly--friends, credit, influence,
forbearance. It was so easy for her to acquire all these--what a pity
she had never learned to keep them! He himself, for instance--the most
insignificant of her acquisitions--was beginning to feel like a
squeezed sponge at the mere thought of her; and it was this sense of
exhaustion, of the inability to provide more, either materially or
morally, which had provoked his exclamation on opening her note. From
the first days of their acquaintance her prodigality had amazed him,
but he had believed it to be surpassed by the infinity of her
resources. If she exhausted old supplies she always found new ones to
replace them. When one set of people began to find her impossible,
another was always beginning to find her indispensable. Yes--but there
were limits--there were only so many sets of people, at least in her
social classification, and when she came to an end of them, what then?
Was this flight to Paris a sign that she had come to an end--was she
going to try Paris because London had failed her? The time of year
precluded such a conjecture. Mrs. Newell's Paris was non-existent in
September. The town was a desert of gaping trippers--he could as soon
think of her seeking social restoration at Margate.

For a moment it occurred to him that she might have to come over to
replenish her wardrobe; but he knew her dates too well to dwell long on
this hope. It was in April and December that she visited the
dress-makers: before December, he had heard her explain, one got
nothing but "the American fashions." Mrs. Newell's scorn of all things
American was somewhat illogically coupled with the determination to use
her own Americanism to the utmost as a means of social advance. She had
found out long ago that, on certain lines, it paid in London to be
American, and she had manufactured for herself a personality
independent of geographical or social demarcations, and presenting that
remarkable blend of plantation dialect, Bowery slang and hyperbolic
statement, which is the British nobility's favorite idea of an
unadulterated Americanism. Mrs. Newell, for all her talents, was not
naturally either humorous or hyperbolic, and there were times when it
would doubtless have been a relief to her to be as monumentally stolid
as some of the persons whose dulness it was her fate to enliven. It was
perhaps the need of re