start. Unabashed by his pompous manner, her keen gray eyes swept him one
quick look from his sphinx-like face to his massive shoe-buckles, as if
she had been given some strange botanical specimen to label and
classify. Without an instant's hesitation she exclaimed in the tone of
one making a delightful discovery, "Why, it's _Hawkins_!"

It was positively uncanny to the man that this stranger on whom he had
never laid eyes before should call him by name. He wondered if she were
one of these new-fangled mind-readers he had been hearing so much about.
It was also upsetting to find that he had been mistaken about her delay
in knocking. There was anything but timidity in the grand air with
which she gave him her card, saying, "Announce me to Madam Chartley,
Hawkins."

She was a plump little body, ill adapted to stately airs and graces, but
she had been rehearsing this entrance mentally for days, and she swept
into the reception room as if she were the daughter of a duke.

"There!" she said to herself as the portières dropped behind her. "I
hope he was properly impressed." Then catching sight of her reflection
in a long mirror opposite, she wilted into an attitude of abject
despair. A loop of milliner's wire, from which the ribbon had slipped,
stood up stiff and straight in the bow on her hat. She proceeded to put
it back in place with anxious pats and touches, exclaiming in an
anguished whisper,

"Oh, _why_ is it, that whenever I feel particularly imposing and Queen
Annish inside, I always look so dishevelled and Mary Annish outside!
Here's my hat cocked over one eye and my hair straggling out in wisps
like a crazy thing. I wonder what Hawkins thought."