Adelaide did not reach home until the troubles with and through Charles Whitney were settled, and Arthur and Dory were deep in carrying out the plans to make the mills and factories part of the university and not merely its property.  When Scarborough’s urgent cable came, Dory found that all the steamers were full.  Adelaide could go with him only by taking a berth in a room with three women in the bottom of the ship.  “Impossible accommodations,” thought he, “for so luxurious a person and so poor a sailor”; and he did not tell her that this berth could be had.  “You’ll have to wait a week or so,” said he.  “As you can’t well stay on here alone, why not accept Mrs. Whitney’s invitation to join her?”

Adelaide disliked Mrs. Whitney, but there seemed to be no alternative.  Mrs. Whitney was at Paris, on the way to America after the wedding and a severe cure at Aix and an aftercure in Switzerland.  She had come for the finishing touches of rejuvenation—­to get her hair redone and to go through her biennial agony of having Auguste, beauty specialist to the royalty, nobility and fashion, and demimonde, of three continents, burn off her outer skin that nature might replace it with one new and fresh and unwrinkled.  She was heavily veiled as she and Adelaide traveled down to Cherbourg to the steamer.  As soon as she got aboard she retired to her room and remained hidden there during the voyage, seen only by her maid, her face covered day and night with Auguste’s marvelous skin-coaxing mask.  Adelaide did not see her again until the morning of the last day, when she appeared on deck dressed beautifully and youthfully for the shore, her skin as fair and smooth as a girl’s, and looking like an elder sister of Adelaide’s—­at a distance.

She paused in New York; Adelaide hastened to Saint X, though she was looking forward uneasily to her arrival because she feared she would have to live at the old Hargrave house in University Avenue.  Miss Skeffington ruled there, and she knew Miss Skeffington—­one of those old-fashioned old maids whose rigid ideas of morality extend to the ordering of personal habits in minutest detail.  Under her military sway everyone had to rise for breakfast at seven sharp, had to dine exactly at noon, sup when the clock struck the half hour after five.  Ingress and egress for members of the family was by the side door only, the front door being reserved for company.  For company also was the parlor, and for company the front stairs with their brilliant carpet, new, though laid for the first time nearly a quarter of a century before; for company also was the best room in the house, which ought to have been attractive, but was a little damp from being shut up so much, and was the cause of many a cold to guests.  “I simply can’t stand it to live by the striking of clocks!” thought Adelaide.  “I must do something!  But what?”