affairs; and she was accordingly left to her own resources.

A schoolmate from the Rocky Mountains, who was taking her
father and mother to Europe, had suggested Sophy's
accompanying them, and "going round" with her while her
progenitors, in the care of the courier, nursed their
ailments at a fashionable bath. Darrow gathered that the
"going round" with Mamie Hoke was a varied and diverting
process; but this relatively brilliant phase of Sophy's
career was cut short by the elopement of the inconsiderate
Mamie with a "matinee idol" who had followed her from New
York, and by the precipitate return of her parents to
negotiate for the repurchase of their child.

It was then--after an interval of repose with compassionate
but impecunious American friends in Paris--that Miss Viner
had been drawn into the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett's
career. The impecunious compatriots had found Mrs. Murrett
for her, and it was partly on their account (because they
were such dears, and so unconscious, poor confiding things,
of what they were letting her in for) that Sophy had stuck
it out so long in the dreadful house in Chelsea. The
Farlows, she explained to Darrow, were the best friends she
had ever had (and the only ones who had ever "been decent"
about Laura, whom they had seen once, and intensely
admired); but even after twenty years of Paris they were the
most incorrigibly inexperienced angels, and quite persuaded
that Mrs. Murrett was a woman of great intellectual
eminence, and the house at Chelsea "the last of the salons"
--Darrow knew what she meant? And she hadn't liked to