friends on Monday afternoon did not seem to her satisfactory. She was
willing to conform to the practice, but she reserved the right of seeing
people on other days as well.

Mrs. Sam Wyndham was never very popular. That is to say, she was not one
of those women who are seemingly never spoken ill of, and are invited as a
matter of course, or rather as an element of success, to every dinner,
musical party, and dance in the season.

Women did not all regard her with envy, all young men did not think she
was capital fun, nor did all old men come and confide to her the
weaknesses of their approaching second childhood. She was not invariably
quoted as the standard authority on dress, classical music, and Boston
literature, and it was not an unpardonable heresy to say that some other
women might be, had been, or could be, more amusing in ordinary
conversation. Nevertheless, Mrs. Sam Wyndham held a position in Boston
which Boston acknowledged, and which Boston insisted that foreigners such
as New Yorkers, Philadelphians and the like, should acknowledge also in
that spirit of reverence which is justly due to a descent on both sides
from several signers of the Declaration of Independence, and to the wife
of one of the ruling financial spirits of the aristocratic part of Boston
business.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Wyndham was about forty years of age, as all her
friends of course knew; for it is as easy for a Bostonian to conceal a
question of age as for a crowned head. In a place where one half of
society calls the other half cousin, and went to school with it, every one
knows and accurately remembers just how old everybody else is. But Mrs.
Wyndham might have passed for younger than she was among the world at
large, for she was fresh to look at, and of good figure and complexion.