in being able to advance to a brilliant career not through
hardship but over the most delightful road imaginable--amusing herself,
wearing charming and satisfactory clothes, swimming and dancing,
motoring and feasting. Without realizing it, she was strongly under
the delusion that she was herself already rich--the inevitable delusion
with a woman when she moves easily and freely and luxuriously about,
never bothered for money, always in the company of rich people. The
rich are fated to demoralize those around them. The stingy rich fill
their satellites with envy and hatred. The generous rich fill them
with the feeling that the light by which they shine and the heat with
which they are warm are not reflected light and heat but their own.

Never had she been so happy. She even did not especially mind Donald
Keith, a friend of Stanley's and of Mrs. Brindley's, who, much too
often to suit her, made one of the party. She had tried in vain to
discover what there was in Keith that inspired such intense liking in
two people so widely different as expansive and emotional Stanley Baird
and reserved and distinctly cold Cyrilla Brindley. Keith talked
little, not only seemed not to listen well, but showed plainly, even in
tete-a-tete conversations, that his thoughts had been elsewhere. He
made no pretense of being other than he was--an indifferent man who
came because it did not especially matter to him where he was.
Sometimes his silence and his indifference annoyed Mildred;
again--thanks to her profound and reckless contentment--she was able to
forget that he was along. He seemed to be and probably was about forty
years old. His head was beautifully shaped, the line of its
profile--front, top, and back--being perfect in intellectuality,
strength and symmetry. He was rather under the medium height, about
the same height as Mildred herself. He was extremely thin and loosely
built, and his clothes seemed to hang awry, giving him an air of
slovenliness which became surprising when one noted how scrupulously
neat and clean he was. His brown hair, considerably tinged with rusty
gray, grew thinly upon that beautiful head. His skin was dry and
smooth and dead white. This, taken with the classic regularity of his
features, gave him an air of lifelessness, of one burnt out by the fire
of too much living; but whether the living had been done by Keith
himself or by his immediate ancestors appearances did not disclose.
This look o