Both in the instant impression it made, and under closest analysis, Rachael Breckenridge’s beauty stood all tests.  Her colorless skin was as pure as ivory, her dark-blue eyes, surrounded by that faint sooty color that only Irish eyes know, were set far apart and evenly arched by perfect brows.  Her white forehead was low and broad, the lustreless black hair was swept back from it with almost startling simplicity, the line of her mouth was long, her lips a living red.  Her figure, as she sat balancing carelessly on a chair-arm, showed the exquisite curves of a woman slow to develop, who is approaching the height of her beauty, and from the tip of her white shoe to the poppies on her soft straw hat there was that distinction in her clothing that betrayed her to be one of the few who may be always individual yet always in the fashion.  She was a woman, quick, dynamic, impatient, who vitalized the very atmosphere in which she moved, challenging life by endless tests and measures, scornful of admiration, and ambitious, even in this recognized ambition of finding herself beautiful, prominent, and a rich man’s wife, for something further and greater, she knew not what.  She was an important figure in this world of hers; her word was authority, her decree law.  Never was censure so quick as hers, never criticism so biting, or satire so witty.  No human emotion was too sacred to form a target for her glancing arrows, nor was any affection deep enough to arouse in her anything but doubt and scorn.

“I don’t want any tea, thank you, Peter,” she said now, in the astonishingly rich voice that seemed to fill the words with new meaning.  “And I won’t allow the Infant to have any—­no, Billy, you shall not.  You’ve got a complexion, child; respect it.  Besides, you’ve just had some.  Besides, we’re here for only two seconds—­ it’s six o’clock.  We’re looking for Clarence—­we seek a husband fond, a parent dear—­”

“Clarence hasn’t showed up here at all to-day,” said Peter Pomeroy, stretching back comfortably in his chair, appreciative eyes upon Clarence’s wife.  “Shame, too, for we had some good golf.  Course is in splendid condition.  George beat me three up and two to play, but I don’t bear any malice.  Here I am signing for his highball.”

“Well, then, we’ll go on home,” Mrs. Breckenridge said, without, however, changing her relaxed position.  “Clarence is probably there; we’ve been playing cards at the Parmalees’, or at least I have.  Billy and Katrina were playing tennis with Kent and—­who’s the red-headed child you were enslaving this afternoon, Bill?”

“Porter Pinckard,” Miss Breckenridge answered, indifferently, before entering into a confidential exchange of brevities with Miss Sartoris.

“I’ll call him out, and run him through the liver,” said Peter Pomeroy, “the miserable catiff!  I’ll brook no rivals, Billy.”

Billy merely smiled lazily at this; her eyes were far more eloquent than her tongue, as she was well aware.