have been present at three o'clock one afternoon in early January
in the sitting-room of the suite which they had assigned to Mrs
Elmer Ford, late of New York, they might well have felt a little
aggrieved. Philosophers among them would possibly have meditated
on the limitations of human effort; for they had done their best
for Mrs Ford. They had housed her well. They had fed her well.
They had caused inspired servants to anticipate her every need.
Yet here she was, in the midst of all these aids to a contented
mind, exhibiting a restlessness and impatience of her surroundings
that would have been noticeable in a caged tigress or a prisoner
of the Bastille. She paced the room. She sat down, picked up a
novel, dropped it, and, rising, resumed her patrol. The clock
striking, she compared it with her watch, which she had consulted
two minutes before. She opened the locket that hung by a gold
chain from her neck, looked at its contents, and sighed. Finally,
going quickly into the bedroom, she took from a suit-case a framed
oil-painting, and returning with it to the sitting-room, placed it
on a chair, and stepped back, gazing at it hungrily. Her large
brown eyes, normally hard and imperious, were strangely softened.
Her mouth quivered.

'Ogden!' she whispered.

The picture which had inspired this exhibition of feeling would
probably not have affected the casual spectator to quite the same
degree. He would have seen merely a very faulty and amateurish
portrait of a singularly repellent little boy of about eleven, who
stared out from the canvas with an expression half stolid, half
querulous; a bulgy, overfed little boy; a little boy who looked
exactly what he was, the spoiled child of parents who had far more