millions were set aside to grow up with her and for her. Also, the list of foreign and aristocratic babyhood was scanned and several dozen possibilities checked off—the list running from the progeny of down-and-out monarchs with a sporting chance for a crown, to the more solid infant aristocracy of Britain.

At the age of nine, the only symptom of intellect that had yet appeared in her was a superbly developed temper. That year she eluded a governess and two trained nurses in the park, and was discovered playing with some unsterilized children near the duck-pond, both hands full of slime and pollywogs.

It was the only crack in the routine through which she ever crawled. Lessons daily in riding, driving, dancing, fencing, gymnastics, squash, tennis, skating, plugged every avenue of escape between morning school and evening sleep, after a mental bath in sterilized literature. Once, out of the window she saw a fire. This event, with several runaways on the bridle-path, included the[12] sensations of her life up to her release from special instructors, and her entry into Idlebrook Institute.

[12]

Here she did all she could to misbehave in a blind and instinctive fashion, but opportunities were pitiably few; and by the time she had graduated, honest deviltry seemed to have been starved out of her; and a half year's finishing abroad apparently eliminated it, leaving only a half-confused desire to be let alone. But solitude was the luxury always denied her.

Unlike the usual debutante, who is a social veteran two years before her presentation, and who at eighteen lacks no experience except intellectual, Miss Cassillis had become neither a judge of champagne nor an expert in the various cabaret steps popular at country houses and the more exclusive dives.

"Mother," she said calmly, on her eighteenth birthday, "do you know that I am known among my associates as a dead one?" At which that fat and hard-eyed matron laughed, surveying her symmetrical daughter with grim content.

"Let me tell you something," she said. "America, socially, is only one vast cabaret, mostly consisting of performers. The spectators are few. You're one. Conditions are reversed across the[13] water; the audience is in the majority.... How do you like young Willowmere?"

[13]

The girl replied that she liked Lord Willowmere. She might have added that she was prepared 

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