“Florrie Spencer is coming to New York,” said Gabriella on the morning she received Mrs. Carr’s letter.  “You know she has just been divorced from her second husband—­somebody she met at the White Sulphur Springs.”

George looked up interested, from his breakfast.

“Florrie coming, is she?” he remarked.  “Well, she’s great fun.  I wonder if she has her eye on anybody now?”

“Not on you, I hope,” observed his father, who joked mildly on the mornings when the news was good; “but she’s a beautiful woman, and she’ll doubtless be able to get whatever she has set either her heart or her eye on.”

“She’ll marry again within six months,” prophesied Mrs. Fowler, with an anxious glance in the direction of her husband’s coffee cup.  “Poor Algy, I always thought he was a hundred times too good for her,” she added, while she abstractedly buttered her toast.  It was one of their extravagant years, and the butter was delicious.

“He adored her,” said Gabriella.  “I shall never forget the evening they spent here.  He couldn’t keep his eyes away from her.  If she had been the most admirable character on earth he couldn’t have loved her better.”

“As if a man ever loved a woman because of her character!” remarked Mrs. Fowler, from the security of her experience.

Several months later Florrie arrived, gay, brilliant, and beautiful, with her waxlike complexion as unlined by care as if it had been on the face of a doll.  Though she had lightened her mourning since Mrs. Carr had described her to Gabriella, she still wore black, and her flaring skirt, her inflexible collar, and her lace sleeves, narrow at the shoulder and full at the wrists, resembled a fashion plate.  Perched at a daring angle above her wheaten-red pompadour, with its exaggerated Marcel wave, she wore a curiously distorted hat of black velvet, lavishly overtrimmed with ostrich feathers; and before this miracle of style, Gabriella became at once oppressively aware of her own lack of the quality which Florrie would have described as “dash.”  Already Florrie’s figure was becoming slightly too protuberant for the style of the new century, and after kissing Gabriella effusively, she stood for a minute struggling for breath, in the attitude of her mother, with her hands pressed to the palpitating sides of her waist.

“I told mother I was certainly coming to see you right straight,” began Florrie, while, with her recovered breath, her figure curved as suddenly as if it were moved by a spring into the fashionable bend of the period.  “I’ve been perfectly crazy to come, but between dressmakers and theatres and I don’t know what else, I simply haven’t had a minute in which I could sit down and breathe.  Mother says I ought to be downright ashamed of myself for being so frivolous when I’ve just got out of such a scrape—­did you ever hear before of anybody getting married for two weeks, Gabriella?  But I know you never did—­you needn’t