pleasure it is
for me to send you this legacy from your father. And I shall only
add the counsel of an old uncle, to invest this money by your
husband's advice in some safe securities." . . .

Honora put down the letter, and sat staring at the cheque in her hand.
Nine thousand dollars--and her own! Her first impulse was to send it back
to her uncle. But that would be, she knew, to hurt his feelings--he had
taken such a pride in handing her this inheritance. She read the letter
again, and resolved that she would not ask Howard to invest the money.
This, at least, should be her very own, and she made up her mind to take
it to a bank in Thames Street that morning.

While she was still under the influence of the excitement aroused by the
unexpected legacy, Mrs. Shorter came in, a lady with whom Honora's
intimacy had been of steady growth. The tie between them might perhaps
have been described as intellectual, for Elsie Shorter professed only to
like people who were "worth while." She lent Honora French plays,
discussed them with her, and likewise a wider range of literature,
including certain brightly bound books on evolution and sociology.

In the eighteenth century, Mrs. Shorter would have had a title and a
salon in the Faubourg: in the twentieth, she was the wife of a most
fashionable and successful real estate agent in New York, and was aware
of no incongruity. Bourgeoise was the last thing that could be said of
her; she was as ready as a George Sand to discuss the whole range of
human emotions; which she did many times a week with certain gentlemen of
intellectual bent who had the habit of calling on her. She had never, to
the knowledge of her acquaintances, been shocked. But while she believed
that a great love carried, mysteriously concealed in its flame, its own
pardon, she had through some fifteen years of married life remained
faithful to Jerry Shorter: who was not, to say the least, a Lochinvar or
a Roland. Although she had had nervous prostration and was thirty-four,
she was undeniably pretty. She was of the suggestive, and not the
strong-minded type, and the secret of her strength with the other sex was
that she was in the habit of submitting her opinions for their approval.

"My dear," she said to Honora, "you may thank heaven that you are still
young enough to look beautiful in negligee. How far have you got? Have
you guessed of which woman Vivarce was the lover? And isn't it the most
exciting pla