she cared to see came to HER (and she could fill her
rooms as easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a
single item to the menu of her suppers), she did not
suffer from her geographic isolation.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended
on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed
city had changed her from a plump active little woman
with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as
vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had
accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her
other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded
by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled
expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the
centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if
awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led
down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled
in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature
portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below,
wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges
of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised
like gulls on the surface of the billows.

The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott's flesh had
long since made it impossible for her to go up and
down stairs, and with characteristic independence she
had made her reception rooms upstairs and established
herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York
proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as
you sat in her sitting-room window with her, you caught