Mrs. Singleton Corey pressed her lips together.  Any recalcitrant club member, or her son, could have told him then that surrender was the only recourse left to him.

“Please tell your searching party that I shall go with them.  Have a saddle horse brought for me, if you can find nothing better.  I shall be ready in half an hour.  Tell one of the maids to bring me coffee, a soft-boiled egg and buttered toast to my room.”  She turned and went up the stairs unhurriedly, as goes one who knows that commands will be obeyed.  She did not look back, or betray the slightest uneasiness, and Barney, watching her slack-jawed until she had reached the top, pulled on a cap and went off to do her bidding.

Mrs. Singleton Corey was not the woman to let small things impede her calm progress toward a certain goal.  She proved that beyond all doubt when she ordered a saddle horse, for she had last ridden upon the back of a horse when she was about fourteen years old.  She had a vague notion that all horses nowadays were trained from their colthood to buck—­whatever that was.  Rodeo posters and such printed matter upon the subject as her eye could not escape had taught her that much, but she refused to be dismayed.  Moreover, she was aware that it would probably be necessary for her to ride astride, as all women seemed to ride nowadays:  yet she did not falter.

From her beautifully fitted traveling bag she produced a pair of ivory-handled manicure scissors, lifted her three-hundred-dollar fur-lined coat from a hook behind the door and proceeded deliberately to ruin both scissors and coat by slitting the back of the coat up nearly to the waist-line, so that she could wear it comfortably on horseback.  Her black broadcloth skirt was in imminent danger of the same surgical revision when a shocked young waitress with the breakfast tray in her hands uttered shrill protest.

“Oh, don’t go and ruin your skirt that way!  They’ve got you a four-horse team and sleigh, Mrs. Corey.  Mercy, ain’t it awful about that poor girl being lost?  Excuse me—­are you her mother, Mrs. Corey?”

Mrs. Singleton Corey, sitting now upon the bed, lifted her aloof glance from the mutilated coat.  “Set the things on the chair, there, since there is no table.  I do not know the girl at all.”  And she added, since it seemed necessary to make oneself very plain to these people:  “I think that will be all, thank you.”  She even went a step farther and gave the girl a tip, which settled all further overtures toward conversation.

The girl went off and cried, and called Mrs. Singleton Corey a stuck-up old hen who would freeze—­and serve her right.  She even hoped that Mrs. Singleton Corey would get stuck in a snowdrift and have to walk every step of the way to Toll-Gate.  Leaving her breakfast when it was all on the table, just as if it would hurt her to eat in the same room with people, and then acting like that to a person!  She wished she had let the old catamaran spoil her skirt; and so on.