mouth. Her little flirtations with prominent men and the ambitious tyros who had been drawn to her salon had given rise to much gossip. Not by any means a beauty, her pretty face and tiptilted nose, her perennial cheerfulness, birdlike vivacity and gift of repartee had made her the center of attraction for years. 

 But she, like Cumberland Ludlow, had refused to grow old gracefully and with resignation. She had put up an equally determined fight against age, and it was only when the remorseless calendar proved her to be sixty-five that she resigned from the struggle, washed the dye out of her hair and the make-up from her face and retired to that old house. Not even then, however, did she resign from all activity and remain contented to sit with her hands in her lap and prepare herself for the next world. This one still held a certain amount of joy, and she concentrated all the vitality that remained with her to the perfect running of her house. At eleven o'clock every morning the tap of her stick on the polished floors was the signal of her arrival, and if every man and woman of the menage was not actively at work, she knew the reason why. Her tongue was still as sharp as the blade of a razor, and for sloppiness she had no mercy. Careless maids trembled before her tirades, and strong men shook in their shoes under her biting phrases. At seventy, with her snowy hair, little face that had gone into as many lines as a dried pippin, bent, fragile body and tiny hands twisted by rheumatism, she looked like one of the old women in a Grimm's fairy tale who frightened children and scared animals and turned giants into cowards. 

 She drew up in front of the frustrated girl, stretched out her white hand lined with blue veins and began to tap her on the shoulder—announcing in that irritating manner that she had a complaint to make. 

 "My dear," she said, "when you write letters to your little friends or your sentimental mother, bear in mind that the place for ink is on the note paper and not on the carpet." 

 "Yes, Grandmother." 

 "Try to remember also that if you put your hand behind a candle you can blow it out without scattering hot grease on the wall paper." 

 "Yes, Grandmother" 

 "There is one other thing, if I may have your patience. You are not required to be a Columbus to discover that there is a basket for soiled linen in your bedroom. It is a large one and eager to fulfill its function. The floor of your clothes 

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