In the overstuffed chair beside one of these windows sat Mrs. Meyerburg with her hands idle and laid out along the chair sides.  They were ringless hands and full of years, with a great network of veins across their backs and the aging fingers large at the knuckles.  But where the hands betrayed the eyes belied.  Deep in Mrs. Meyerburg’s soft and scarcely flabby face her gaze was straight and very black.

An hour by an inlaid ormolu clock she sat there, her feet in soft, elastic-sided shoes, just lifted from the floor.  Incongruous enough, on a plain deal table beside her, a sheaf of blue-prints lay unrolled.  She fingered them occasionally and with a tenderness, as if they might be sensitive to touch; even smiled and held the sheets one by one up against the shrouded window so that the light pressing through them might emphasize the labyrinth of lines.  Dozed, with a smile printed on her lips, and awoke when her head lopped too heavily sidewise.

After an interval she slid out of her chair and crossed to the door; even in action her broad, squat figure infinitesimal to the room’s proportions.  When she opened the door the dignity of great halls lay in waiting.  She crossed the wide vista to a closed door, a replica of her own, and knocked, waited, turned the crystal knob, knocked, waited.  Rapped again, this time in three staccatos.  Silence.  Then softly and with her cheek laid against the imperturbable panel of the closed door: 

“Becky!  Becky!  Open!  Open!”

A muffled sound from within as if a sob had been let slip.

Then again, rattling the knob this time:  “Becky, it’s mamma.  Becky, you should get up now; it’s time for our drive.  Let me in, Becky.  Open!” shaking the handle.

When the door opened finally, Mrs. Meyerburg stepped quickly through the slit, as if to ward off its too heavy closing.  A French maid, in the immemorial paraphernalia of French maids, stood by like a slim sentinel on stilts, her tall, small heels clicked together.  Perfume lay on the artificial dusk of that room.

“Therese, you can go down awhile.  When Miss Becky wants she can ring.”

“Oui, madame.”

“I wish, Therese, when you go down you would tell Anna I don’t want she should put the real lace table-cloth from Miss Becky’s party last night in the linen-room.  Twice I’ve told her after its use she should always bring it right back to me.”

“Oui, madame.”  And Therese flashed out on the slim heels.

In the crowded apartment, furnished after the most exuberant of the various exuberant French periods, Miss Rebecca Meyerburg lay on a Louis Seize bed, certified to have been lifted, down to the casters, from the Grand Trianon of Marie Antoinette.  In a great confusion of laces and linens, disarrayed as if tossed by a fever patient, she lay there, her round young arm flung up over her head and her face turned downward to the curve of one elbow.