brought him ambling into
Berenice's presence suggesting a Sunday drive to Saddle Rock.

"Haw! haw! You know, I'm delighted to see you again. Haw! haw! It's
been an age since I've seen the Haggertys. We missed you after you
left. Haw! haw! I did, you know. Since I saw you I have taken up
polo--three ponies with me all the time now--haw! haw!--a regular
stable nearly."

Berenice strove valiantly to retain a serene interest. Duty was in her
mind, the Chateau Brieul, the winter court of Clarissa Garrison, some
first premonitions of the flight of time. Yet the drive was a bore,
conversation a burden, the struggle to respond titanic, impossible.
When Monday came she fled, leaving three days between that and a
week-end at Morristown. Mrs. Batjer--who read straws most
capably--sighed. Her own Corscaden was not much beyond his money, but
life must be lived and the ambitious must inherit wealth or gather it
wisely. Some impossible scheming silly would soon collect Duelma, and
then-- She considered Berenice a little difficult.

Berenice could not help piecing together the memory of this incident
with her mother's recent appeal in behalf of Lieutenant Braxmar. A
great, cloying, disturbing, disintegrating factor in her life was
revealed by the dawning discovery that she and her mother were without
much money, that aside from her lineage she was in a certain sense an
interloper in society. There were never rumors of great wealth in
connection with her--no flattering whispers or public notices regarding
her station as an heiress. All the smug minor manikins of the social
world were on the qui vive for some cotton-headed doll of a girl with
an endless bank-account. By nature sybaritic, an intense lover of art
fabrics, of stately functions, of power and success in every form, she
had been dreaming all this while of a great soul-freedom and
art-freedom under some such circumstances as the greatest individual
wealth of the day, and only that, could provide. Simultaneously she
had vaguely cherished the idea that if she ever found some one who was
truly fond of her, and whom she could love or even admire
intensely--some one who needed her in a deep, sincere way--she would
give herself freely and gladly. Yet who could it be? She had been
charmed by Braxmar, but her keen, analytic intelligence required some
one harder, more vivid, more ruthless, some one who would appeal to her
as an immense force. Yet she must be conservati