ease of locomotion that made it seem oddly doubtful if she were dependent upon the ground at all for a base. There are tall women who, if they do not collide with stationary objects when they undertake a tour of a room, at least arouse the fear that they will infallibly do so. Laura possessed an eye for the measurement of distances, and the litheness perfectly to follow her measurement. Her complexion was that of a woman to whom a long tramp, even in the city, in the mist or in the blinding rain, was not a task, but a delight. Her hair, all her own, yet worn in the final perverse mood of exaggeration of the coiffure "artist," was of an incredible burnished black, in unusual contrast with her full, kindling, Celtic-grey eyes. A certain irregularity in the outline of her features—especially of her nose, which, far from being aquiline, was too short by the merest fraction—lent a certain piquancy to her expression, even when her face was in repose. She had the habit, growing rare in a world of social avoidances and white lies, of looking the person addressing her straight in the eye. It was not an impaling, disquieting gaze, but one that fairly demanded truthfulness and candor; a gaze unconsciously calculated to cause the liar to stutter in the manufacture of his lie.

LAURA, A WOMAN OF THIRTY-FIVE, HAD THE SLENDER YET WELL-ROUNDED STRUCTURAL SINUOSITIES OF A GIRL OF TWENTY.

Mrs. Treharne, four years older than Laura, had the somewhat hollow-eyed plumpness of an indoor woman who wars fiercely but hopelessly and unequally upon ever-threatening embonpoint. Her triumphs over the enemy never were better than drawn battles; she was compelled to devote at least three hours a day to her determined, almost hysterical warfare upon the natural process of accretion, solely that she might not gain; long before she had abandoned hope of achieving the fragility of outline she pined for. The nostrums she employed in this incessant conflict had made her fragile, however, in at least one respect: her health; besides imparting a certain greenish-yellow tint to her skin which made her make-up box almost as necessary a part of her equipment as the hands wherewith she applied the mitigating tints. Five years before she had been a fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, naturally pretty woman of a somewhat inconsequential type; but the necessity—the hideous duty, as she deemed it—of banting without cessation or intermission had left her merely her regular features upon which artificially to create the illusion of a youthfulness she was far from feeling. With the final touch added for an appearance in a company, she still looked dainty, certainly of impeccable grooming. But she had learned to 

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