, do you think?" asked the young Oxford man, busy with his note-book. Yet it seemed one of life's keenest small ironies that out of such pale-tinted atmospheres should come the volumes which the turgid, hurrying, surging world was so ready to devour. It was no wonder, he felt, that she wanted to be free.

"It sounds odd to you, I suppose?" she went on. "But that's because you're an outsider. Here in New York you'll find plenty such persons, anxious enough to shine in the reflected light of the real workers. Mrs. Spaulding is different from the rest—she would be as true as steel, I know. But the ordinary kind are not easy to hold. Their whims change, and you have to change with them. They take you up just as they'd take up a new design in foulards, or a novelty in their stationery, or a new breed of Pomeranian. We all have our hobbies, you know," she added, with just the slightest touch of bitterness in her voice.

"But you have been particularly happy," said her visitor, sweeping the expensively and tastefully furnished study with his quick eye. Then he wondered, as he looked at her, if already she was tired of publicity.

"It's nice to be free," she sighed, as in answer to his glance.

"The road that leads to freedom is always beautiful," agreed the young Oxonian. "But your cage seems rather a golden one."

"It has to be, or I'd eat through the bars. You see, there was really a Waterloo fought over me. Mrs. Simpson-Burgess wanted to capture me—yes, isn't it flattering?—and Mrs. Spaulding wanted me, so they had to fight it out."

"On which, some day, I should like to congratulate Mrs. Spaulding."

"Oh, thanks," sighed the other.

There was a moment of constrained silence. The young man felt that they had been treading on thin ice.

"You must be sure to meet Mrs. Spaulding," went on Cordelia. "I know she'll be interested in you. She'll probabl