From time to time she also admitted into this charmed circle a young girl or two, though almost never one of the University girls, of whom she made the jolliest possible fun.  Her favorites were the daughters of good La Chance families who at seventeen had “finished” at Miss Home’s Select School for Young Ladies, and who came out in society not later than eighteen.  She seemed able, as long as she cared to do it, to exercise as irresistible a fascination over these youthful members of her own sex as over the older masculine undergraduates of the University.  They copied their friend’s hats and neckwear and shoes and her mannerisms of speech, were miserable if she neglected them for a day, furiously jealous of each other, and raised to the seventh heaven by attention from her.  Just at present the only girl admitted frequently to Mrs. Draper’s intimacy was Eleanor Hubert.

On the day following the Gymnasium exhibition, when Sylvia, promptly at five, entered the picturesque vine-covered Draper house, she found it occupied by none of the usual habitues of the place.  The white-capped, black-garbed maid who opened the door to the girl held aside for her a pair of heavy brown-velvet portieres which veiled the entrance to the drawing-room.  The utter silence of this servitor seemed portentous and inhuman to the young guest, unused to the polite convention that servants cast no shadow and do not exist save when serving their superiors.

She found herself in a room as unlike any she had ever seen as though she had stepped into a new planet.  The light here was as yellow as gold, and came from a great many candles which, in sconces and candelabra, stood about the room, their oblong yellow flame as steady in the breathless quiet of the air as though they burned in a vault underground.  There was not a book in the room, except one in a yellow cover lying beside a box of candy on the mantelpiece, but every ledge, table, projection, or shelf was covered with small, queerly fashioned, dully gleaming objects of ivory, or silver, or brass, or carved wood, or porcelain.

The mistress of the room now came in.  She was in a loose garment of smoke-brown chiffon, held in place occasionally about her luxuriously rounded figure by a heavy cord of brown silk.  She advanced to Sylvia with both hands outstretched, and took the girl’s slim, rather hard young fingers in the softest of melting palms.  “Aren’t you a dear, to be so exactly on time!” she exclaimed.

Sylvia was a little surprised.  She had thought it axiomatic that people kept their appointments promptly.  “Oh, I’m always on time,” she answered simply.

Mrs. Draper laughed and pulled her down on the sofa.  “You clear-eyed young Diana, you won’t allow me even an instant’s illusion that you were eager to come to see me!”

“Oh yes, I was!” said Sylvia hastily, fearing that she might have said something rude.

Mrs. Draper laughed again and gave the hand she still held a squeeze.  “You’re adorable, that’s what you are!” She exploded this pointblank charge in Sylvia’s face with nonchalant ease, and went on with another.  “Jerry Fiske is quite right about you.  I suppose you know that you’re here today so that Jerry can meet you.”