So presently callers began to go up to the Hall; first Mrs.
Apostleman and Mrs. White, as was fitting, and then a score of other
women. Mrs. Apostleman had been the social leader in Santa Paloma
when Mrs. White was little Clara Peck, a pretty girl in the High
School, whose rich widowed mother dressed her exquisitely, and who
was studying French, and could play the violin. But Mrs. Apostleman
was an old woman now, and had been playing the game a long time, and
she was glad to put the sceptre into younger hands. And she could
have put it into none more competent than those of Mrs. Willard
White.

Mrs. White was a handsome, clever woman, of perhaps six-or seven-
and-thirty. She had been married now for seventeen years, and for
all that time, and even before her marriage, she had been the most
envied, the most admired, and the most copied woman in the village.
Her mother, an insipid, spoiled, ambitious little woman, whose
fondest hope was realized when her dashing daughter made a
financially brilliant match, had lost no time in warning the bride
that the agonies of motherhood, and the long ensuing slavery, were
avoidable, and Clara had entirely agreed with her mother's ideas,
and used to laughingly assure the few old friends who touched upon
this delicate topic, that she herself "was baby enough for Will!"
Robbed in this way of her natural estate, and robbed by the size of
her husband's income from the exhilarating interest of making
financial ends meet, Mrs. White, for seventeen years, had led what
she honestly considered an enviable and carefree existence. She
bought beautiful clothes for herself, and beautiful things for her
house, she gave her husband and her mother very handsome gifts. She
was a perfect hostess, although it must be admitted that she never
extended the hospitalities of her handsome home to anyone who did