CHAPTER I

THE GREAT MRS. DE PEYSTER


It was a raw, ill-humored afternoon, yet too late in the spring for
the ministration of steam heat, so the unseasonable May chill was
banished from Mrs. De Peyster's sitting-room by a wood fire that
crackled in the grate; crackled most decorously, be it added, for
Mrs. De Peyster's fire would no more have forgotten itself and shown
a boisterous enthusiasm than would one of her admirably trained
servants. Beside a small steel safe, whose outer shell of exquisite
cabinet-work transformed that fortress against burglarious desire into
an article of furniture that harmonized with the comfortable elegance
of a lady's boudoir, sat Mrs. De Peyster herself--she was born a De
Peyster--carefully transferring her jewels from the trays of the safe
to leathern cases. She looked quite as Mrs. De Peyster should have
looked: with an aura of high dignity that a sixty-year-old dowager of
the first water could not surpass, yet with a freshness of person that
(had it not been for her dignity) might have made her early forties
seem a blossomy thirty-five.

Before the well-bred fire sat a lady whose tears had long since
dried that she had shed when she had bid good-bye to thirty. She
was--begging the lady's pardon--a trifle spare, and a trifle pale,
and though in a manner well enough dressed her clothes had an air
of bewilderment, of general irresolution, as though each article was