persuaded to share the Pomeroy name and fortune. But Peter went on
kissing their hands, and thrilling them with an intimate casual
word now and then, and did no more.

Perhaps he smiled about it sometimes, in the privacy of his own
apartments--apartments which were variously located in a great
city hotel, an Adirondacks camp, a luxurious club, his own yacht,
and the beautiful home he had built for himself within a mile of
the spot where he was now having his tea. Sometimes it seemed
amusing to him that so many traps were laid for him. He could
appraise women quickly, and now and then he teased a woman of his
acquaintance with a delightfully worded description of his ideal
of a wife. If the woman thereafter carelessly indicated the
possession of the desired qualities in herself, Peter saw that,
too, but she never knew it, and never saw him laughing at her. She
went on for a month or two dressing brilliantly for his carefully
chaperoned little dinners, listening absorbed to his dissertations
upon Japanese prints or draperies from Peshawar, until Peter grew
tired and drew off, when she must put a brave face upon it and do
her share to show that she realized that the little game was over.

He had not been entirely without feminine companionship, however,
during the half-century of his life as a man. Everybody knew
something--and suspected a great deal more--of various friendships
of his. Even the girls knew that Peter Pomeroy was not over-
cautious in the management of his affairs, but they did not like
him the less, nor did their mothers find him less eligible, in a
matrimonial sense. Sometimes he met the older women's hints quite
seriously, with brief allusions to some "little girl" who was
always as sweet and deserving and virtuous as his own fatherly