ery well dressed, evidently a
well-guarded young thing from one of the summer colonies. The mother,
high corseted, and elegant in dark blue lines, which made only a
graceful concession to age, without fairly admitting it, never
allowed one glance of the young man's to escape her. She also saw her
slender young daughter with every sense in her body and mind.

Margaret looked away from them. The elder woman had given her costume
an appreciative, and herself a supercilious glance, which had been
met with one which did not seem to recognise her visibility. Margaret
was not easily put down by another woman. She stared absently at the
ornate and weary decorations of the room. It was handsome, but
tiresome, as everybody who entered realised, and as, no doubt, the
decorator had found out. It was a ready-made species of room, with no
heart in it, in spite of the harmonious colour scheme and really
artistic detail.

Presently the boy with the silver tray entered and approached
Margaret. The young man stared openly at her. He began to wonder if
she were not younger than he had thought. The girl never raised her
downcast eyes; the older woman cast one swift sharp glance at her.
The boy murmured so inaudibly that Margaret barely heard, and she
rose and followed him as he led the way to the elevator. Miss
Wallingford, who was a young Western woman and a rising, if not
already arisen literary star, had signified her willingness to
receive Mrs. Wilbur Edes in her own private sitting-room. Margaret
was successful so far. She had pencilled on her card, "Can you see me
on a matter of importance? I am not connected with the Press," and
the young woman who esteemed nearly everything of importance, and was
afraid of the Press, had agreed at once to see her. Miss Martha
Wallingford was staying in the hotel with an elderly aunt, against
whose rule she rebelled in spite of her youth and shyness, which
apparently made it impossible for her to rebel against anybody, and
the aunt had retired stiffly to her bedroom when her niece said
positively that she would see her caller.

"You don't know who she is and I promised your Pa when we started
that I wouldn't let you get acquainted with folks unless I knew all
about them," the aunt had said and the niece, the risen star, had set
her mouth hard. "We haven't seen a soul except those newspaper men,
and I know everyone of them is married, and those two newspaper women
who told about my sleeves being