ung yet weary expression of her face. To go with the dress
she had a large hat of black rough straw with a very little
white trimming on it. With this large black hat bewitchingly
set upon her gracefully-done dark wavy hair, her sad, dreamy
eyes, her pallid skin, her sweet-bitter mouth with its rouged
lips seemed to her to show at their best. She felt that
nothing was quite so effective for her skin as a white dress.
In other colors--though she did not realize--the woman of bought
kisses showed more distinctly--never brazenly as in most of the
girls, but still unmistakably. In white she took on a glamour
of melancholy--and the human countenance is capable of no
expression so universally appealing as the look of melancholy
that suggests the sadness underlying all life, the pain that
pays for pleasure, the pain that pays and gets no pleasure, the
sorrow of the passing of all things, the faint foreshadow of
the doom awaiting us all. She washed the rouge from her lips,
studied the effect in the glass. "No," she said aloud,
"without it I feel like a hypocrite--and I don't look half so
well." And she put the rouge on again--the scarlet dash drawn
startlingly across her strange, pallid face.

CHAPTER XII

AT three that afternoon she stood in the vestibule of Brent's
small house in Park Avenue overlooking the oblong of green
between East Thirty-seventh Street and East Thirty-eighth. A
most reputable looking Englishman in evening dress opened the
door; from her reading and her theater-going she knew that
this was a butler. He bowed her in. The entire lower floor
was given to an entrance hall, done in plain black walnut,
almost lofty of ceiling, and with a grand stairway leading to
the upper part of the house. There was a huge fireplace to
the right; a mirror filled the entire back wall; a broad low
seat ran all round the room. In one corner, an enormous urn
of dark pottery; in another corner, a suit of armor, the
helmet, the breastplate and the gauntlets set with gold of
ancient lackluster.

The butler left her there and ascended the polished but
dead-finished stairway noiselessly. Susan had never before
been in so grand a room. The best private house she had ever
seen was Wright's in Sutherland; and while everybody else in
Sutherland thought it magnificent, she had felt that there was
something wrong, what she had not known. The grandiose New
York hotels and restaurants were more showy and more
pr