its pretty view of men and things with any one.  In country house parties she loved the mild wonder that the successful litterateuse could fight and play and win her social triumphs so well.  She loved the star part, and next to playing it she enjoyed wresting it from other women or eclipsing them completely in some conspicuously minor role, while, in the matter of dress, Miss Colebrooke went beyond the point decreed by the most exigent mandates of fashion.  When hats were worn over the face, her admirers had to content themselves with a glimpse of her charming mouth and chin.  When they flared, hers fairly challenged the laws of equilibrium.  She danced with the same facility with which she rode, swam, and played tennis.  In doing these things supremely well she felt that she vindicated the position of the woman of letters.  Why should one be a frump because one wrote?

Her friendship with Peter was to endure to greenest old age, more platonic, perhaps, than that of Madame Recamier and Chateaubriand.  It was to be fruitful in letters that would compare favorably with the best of the seventeenth century series.  Even now her own letters to Peter were no sprightly scrawl of passing events, but efforts whose seriousness suggested, at least in their carefully elaborated stages of structure, the letters of the ladies of Cranford.

But in the course of these Western wanderings, undertaken not wholly without consideration of Peter, there had appeared in the maplike exactness of her plans an indefinite territory that threatened undreamed-of proportions.  It menaced the scheme of the letters, it shook the foundations of the Chateaubriand-Recamier friendship.  The unknown quantity was none other than the frequent and irritating mention of one Judith Rodney, who, from all accounts, appeared a half-breed.  Her name, her beauty, some intrinsic charm of personality made her an all too frequent topic, except in the case of Peter.  He had been singularly keen in scenting any interrogatory venue that led to the mysterious half-breed; when questioned he persistently refused to exhibit her as a type.

Kitty knew that she had treated her long-suffering cavalier with scant consideration the day he had spurred across the desert to see her.  True, she had written him on her arrival, but, with feminine perversity of logic, thought it a trifle inconsiderate of him to come so soon after that trying railroad journey.  An ardent resumption of his suit—­and Peter could be depended on for renewing it early and often—­was farthest from her inclination at that particular time.  She intended to salve her conscience at the wolf-hunt for her casual reception of his impetuous visit.  But apparently Peter did not intend to be prodigal of opportunity.

“How garrulous you people are this morning!” Nannie Wetmore challenged them.  Peter came out of his brown study with the look of one who has again returned to earth.

“You don’t find it like the drop-curtain of a theatre, now that you’ve seen it?” he questioned Kitty.  For she had doubted her pleasure in the mountains, in the conviction that they would be too dramatic for her simple taste.