"She is not so very old," replied Alice. "It is only her white hair
that makes her seem so." Then she extended a rather large but well
gloved hand and opened the coupé door, while Jim Fitzgerald sat and
chewed and waited, and the two young women got out. Daisy had some
trouble in holding up her long skirts. She tugged at them with
nervous energy, and told Alice of the twenty-five cents which
Fitzgerald would ask for the return trip. She had wished to arrive at
the club in fine feather, but had counted on walking home in the
dusk, with her best skirts high-kilted, and saving an honest penny.

"Nonsense; of course you will go with me," said Alice in the calmly
imperious way she had, and the two mounted the steps. They had
scarcely reached the door before Mrs. Slade's maid, Lottie, appeared
in her immaculate width of apron, with carefully-pulled-out bows and
little white lace top-knot. "Upstairs, front room," she murmured, and
the two went up the polished stairs. There was a landing halfway,
with a diamond paned window and one rubber plant and two palms, all
very glossy, and all three in nice green jardinières which exactly
matched the paper on the walls of the hall. Mrs. George B. Slade had
a mania for exactly matching things. Some of her friends said among
themselves that she carried it almost too far.

The front room, the guest room, into which Alice Mendon and Daisy
Shaw passed, was done in yellow and white, and one felt almost sinful
in disturbing the harmony by any other tint. The walls were yellow,
with a frieze of garlands of yellow roses; the ceiling was tinted
yellow, the tiles on the shining little hearth were yellow, every
ornament upon the mantel-shelf was yellow, down to a china
shepherdess who wore a yellow china gown and carried a basket filled
with yellow flowers, and bore a yellow crook. The bedstead was brass,