I had been your grandfather, I would have started you in puddling,"
she observed, as she eyed with disapproval the filling of his third glass
of champagne. "I think there is too much gay life, too much games for
rich young men nowadays. You will forgive me for saying what I think to
young men?"

"I'll forgive you for not being my grandfather, at any rate," replied
Ham, with unaccustomed wit.

She gazed at him with grim humour.

"It is bad for you I am not," she declared.

There was no gainsaying her. What can be done with a lady who will not
recognize that morality is not discussed, and that personalities are
tabooed save between intimates. Hilda was a personage as well as a
Tartar. Laws, conventions, usages--to all these she would conform when it
pleased her. She would have made an admirable inquisitorial judge, and
quite as admirable a sick nurse. A rare criminal lawyer, likewise, was
wasted in her. She was one of those individuals, I perceived, whose
loyalties dominate them; and who, in behalf of those loyalties, carry
chips on their shoulders.

"It is a long time that I have been wanting to meet you," she informed
me. "You are smart."

I smiled, yet I was inclined to resent her use of the word, though I was
by no means sure of the shade of meaning she meant to put into it. I had,
indeed, an uneasy sense of the scantiness of my fund of humour to meet
and turn such a situation; for I was experiencing, now, with her, the
same queer feeling I had known in my youth in the presence of Cousin
Robert Breck--the suspicion that this extraordinary person saw through
me. It was as though she held up a mirror and compelled me to look at my
soul features. I tried to assure myself that the mirror was distorted. I
lost, nevertheless, the sureness of touch that comes from the conviction
of being all of a piece. She contrived to resolve me again into
conflicting elements. I was, for the moment, no longer the self-confident
and triumphant young attorney accustomed to carry all before him, to
command respect and admiration, but a complicated being whose unity had
suddenly been split. I glanced around the table at Ogilvy, at Dickinson,
at Ralph Hambleton. These men were functioning truly. But was I? If I
were not, might not this be the reason for the lack of synthesis--of
which I was abruptly though vaguely aware between my professional life,
my domestic relationships, and my relationships with friends. The loyalty
of the woman