el-trimmed base-burner, the pink mica had cooled to gray.
Sweeping open that door, she closed it softly, standing for the moment
against it, her hand crossed in back and on the knob. It was as if
standing there with her head cocked and beneath a shadowy blue
sailor-hat, a smile coming out, something within her was playing,
sweetly insistent to be heard. Philomela, at the first sound of her
nightingale self, must have stood thus, trembling with melody. Opposite
her, above the crowded mantelpiece and surmounted by a raffia wreath,
the enlarged-crayon gaze of her deceased maternal grandparent, abetted
by a horrible device of photography, followed her, his eyes focusing the
entire room at a glance. Impervious to that scrutiny, Miss Coblenz moved
a tiptoe step or two further into the room, lifting off her hat, staring
and smiling through a three-shelved cabinet of knick-knacks at what she
saw far beyond. Beneath the two jets, high lights in her hair came out,
bronze showing through the brown waves and the patches of curls brought
out over her cheeks.

In her dark-blue dress with the row of silver buttons down what was hip
before the hipless age, the chest sufficiently concave and the
silhouette a mere stroke of hard pencil, Miss Selene Coblenz measured up
and down to America's Venus de Milo, whose chief curvature is of the
spine. Slim-etched, and that slimness enhanced by a conscious kind of
collapse beneath the blue-silk girdle that reached up halfway to her
throat, hers were those proportions which strong women, eschewing the
sweetmeat, would earn by the sweat of the Turkish bath.

When Miss Coblenz caught her eye in the square of mirror above the
mantelpiece, her hands flew to her cheeks to feel of their redness. They
were soft cheeks, smooth with the pollen of youth, and hands still
casing them, she moved another step toward the portiered door.

"Mamma!"

Mrs. Coblenz emerged immediately, finger up for silence, kissing her
daughter on the little spray of cheek-curls.

"Shh-h-h! Gramaw just had a terrible spell."

She dropped down into the upholstered chair beside the base-burner, the
pink and moisture of exertion out in her face, took to fanning herself
with the end of a face-towel flung across her arm.

"Poor gramaw!" she said. "Poor gramaw!"

Miss Coblenz sat down on the edge of a slim, home-gilded chair, and took
to gathering the blue-silk dress into little plaits at her knee.

"Of course--if you don't want