convince her of the falsity of her lover.

She was quite calm now. She dressed with the utmost care. Margaret,
who had seen her in such anger only a short time before, was surprised
at her sprightliness and graciousness. A slightly heightened color
that only added to the luster of her loveliness, was the single sign of
her inward thoughts. She summoned her own car and left the house
alone.

The drawing room of the Clarence Courtelyou mansion was ablaze with
light. There was a little too much light. The Clarence Courtelyou
always had a little too much of everything.

There was a little too much money; there was a little too much gold
leaf decoration in the drawing room, a little too much diamond
decoration of Mrs. Courtelyou, and, if you were so fastidiously
impolite as to say so, a little too much of Mrs. Courtelyou herself.

But Mrs. Courtelyou was struggling toward gentility in such an amiable
way that better people liked her. The motherliness and sweet sincerity
of her--the fact that she loved her frankly illiterate husband and
worshipped, almost from afar, her cultured daughters was the thing that
brought her down from the base height of the "climbers" and lifted her
kindly, harmless personality to the high simplicities of the elite.

She made the natural mistake that other wealthy mendicants at the outer
portals of society have made the mistake of pounding at the gates.
Instead of letting the splendor of her charitable gifts, the
gracefulness of her simplicity, carry her through, she went in for the
gorgeous and the costly.

As a sort of crowning glory she began to "take up" artists and actors
and musicians. She gained the good graces of the best of them, and in
her kindly innocence she won the worship of the worst.

It was thus that she came to the point of holding a reception for
Baskinelli.

Not that any one had heard anything black, or even shadowy, against
Baskinelli. He had arrived recently from abroad, his foreign fame
preceding him, his prospective conquests of America fulsomely foretold,
his low brow decorated in advance with laurel.

Mrs. Courtelyou added him to her collection with the swiftness and
directness of the entomologist discovering a new bug. She herself
loved music--without understanding it very deeply--and Baskinelli,
whatever might be his other gifts, could summon all the cadences of
love from the machines that people call a piano--engine of torture or
instrument of joy