if this could really be an inheritance from her
well-nerved father or the result of her years as teacher in a finishing
school for young ladies. I was tempted to suspect the latter, for,
physically, the creature was by no means formidable. Perhaps an inch or
two taller than her mother, she was of a marked slenderness; a
_completed_ slenderness, I might say--a slenderness so palpably finished
as to details that I can only describe it as felicitous in the extreme.
It seemed almost certain that her appearance had once been disarming,
that the threat in her eye-flash and tilted head was a trick learned by
contact with many young ladies who needed finishing more than they would
admit.

Of course this did not explain why Miss Lansdale should visually but
patently disparage me at this moment. I was by no means an unfinished
young lady, and, in any event, she should have left all that behind; the
moment was one wherein relaxation would have been not only graceful but
entirely safe, for she was in no manner to be held accountable for my
conduct.

Yet again and again her curious reserve congealed me back upon the
stanch regard of Miss Caroline. My passion for that sprightly dame and
her gracious acceptance of it were happily not to deteriorate under the
regard of any possible daughter, however egregiously might we flaunt to
her trained eye our need to be "finished."

The newcomer's reserve was indeed pregnable to no assault I could
devise. Not even did she lighten when I said to her mother, in open
mockery of that reserve, "Well, she cost you a lot of furniture that was
really most companionable about the house," and paused with a sigh
betokening a regretful comparison of values. That lance shattered
against her Lansdale shield like all the others.

Ending my call, I felt vividly what I have elsewhere seen described as
"the cosmic chill". The small, mighty, night-eyed, well-completed Miss
Lansdale, with the voice of a golden jangle, had frozen it about me in
lavish abundance.

I went home to play the game, until my eyes tired so that the face of
king, queen, and knave leered at me in defeat or simpered sickeningly
when I was able to shape their destinies. Thrice I lost interestingly
and with profit to my soul, and once I won, though without elation, for
we know that little skill may be needed to win when the cards fall
right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit.

Even after that I must have recourse to t