good deal of romance in the lives of several other people. Her position
was unusual, and her personality fascinating. She had no parents, was an
heiress, and lived alone with a companion in a quaint little house just
out of Berkeley Square, with a large studio, that was never used for
painting. She had such an extraordinary natural gift for making people
of both sexes fond of her, that it would have been difficult to say
which, of all the persons who loved her, showed the most intense
devotion in the most immoderate way. Probably her cousin and guardian,
Sir Charles Cannon, and her companion, Anne Yeo, spent more thought and
time in her service than did anybody else. Edith's imagination had been
fired in their school-days by her friend's beauty and cleverness, and by
the fact that she had a guardian, like a book. Then Hyacinth had come
out and gone in for music, for painting, and for various other arts and
pursuits of an absorbing character. She had hardly any acquaintances
except her relations, but possessed an enormously large number of
extremely intimate friends--a characteristic that had remained to her
from her childhood.

Hyacinth's ideal of society was to have no padding, so that most of the
members of her circle were types. Still, as she had a perfect passion
for entertaining, there remained, of course, a residue; distant elderly
connections with well-sounding names (as ballast), and a few vague
hangers-on; several rather dull celebrities, some merely pretty and
well-dressed women, and a steadily increasing number of good-looking
young men. Hyacinth was fond of decoration.

As she frankly admitted, she had rather fallen back on Edith, finding
her, after many experiments, the most agreeable of friends, chiefly
because in their intercourses everything was always taken for granted.
Like sisters, they understood one another without explanation--_a