S WELLINGTON ENLARGES HER EXPERIENCE

Few places in the well-ordered centres of civilization are so
altogether dreary as Wickford Junction, shortly before five o'clock in
the morning, when the usual handful of passengers alight from the
Boston express. The sun has not yet climbed to the top of the seaward
hills of Rhode Island, the station and environment rest in a damp
semi-gloom, everything shut in, silent--as though Nature herself had
paused for a brief time before bursting into glad, effulgent day.

The station is locked; one grocery store in the distance presents a
grim, boarded front to the sleeping street. No one is awake save the
arriving passengers; they are but half so, hungry and in the nature of
things cross. Mrs. Wellington was undisguisedly in that mood.

Armitage found some degree of sardonic pleasure in watching her as she
viewed with cold disapproval the drowsy maids and her daughter, who
although as immaculate and fresh and cool and altogether delightful as
the morning promised to be, persisted in yawning from time to time with
the utmost abandon. Armitage had never seen a woman quite like the
mother. Somewhat above medium height, there was nothing in the least
way matronly about her figure; it had still the beautiful supple lines
of her youth, and her dark brown hair was untinged by the slightest
suggestion of gray. It was the face that portrayed the inexorable
progress of the years and the habits and all that in them had lain.
Cold, calculating, unyielding, the metallic eyes dominated a gray
lineament, seamed and creased with fine hair-like lines.

No flippant, light-headed, pleasure-seeking creature of society was
Belle Wellington. Few of her sort are, public belief to the contrary
notwithstanding. Her famous fight for social primacy, now lying far
behind in the vague past, had been a struggle worthy of an epic,
however meticulous the object of her ambition may have appeared in the
eyes of many good people. At all events she had striven for a goal not
easy of attainment.

Many years before, on the deck of her husband's yacht--whither, by
methods she sternly had forgotten, had been lured a select few of a
select circle--the fight had begun. Even now she awoke sometimes at
night with a shudder, having lived again in vivid dream that August
afternoon in Newport Harbor, when she sat at her tea table facing the
first ordeal. She had come through it. With what rare felicity had
she scatte