Old Peter Pomeroy, who had a shrewd and disillusioned gray eye, thought, as everyone else thought, that Mrs. Sartoris was an empty-headed little fool, but he rarely talked to a woman who was anything else, and no woman ever thought him anything but markedly courteous and gallant.  He was old now, rich, unmarried, quite alone in the world.  For forty years he had kept all the women of his acquaintance speculating as to his plans; marriageable women especially—­perhaps fifty of them—­had been able in all maidenliness to indicate to him that they might easily be persuaded to share the Pomeroy name and fortune.  But Peter went on kissing their hands, and thrilling them with an intimate casual word now and then, and did no more.

Perhaps he smiled about it sometimes, in the privacy of his own apartments—­apartments which were variously located in a great city hotel, an Adirondacks camp, a luxurious club, his own yacht, and the beautiful home he had built for himself within a mile of the spot where he was now having his tea.  Sometimes it seemed amusing to him that so many traps were laid for him.  He could appraise women quickly, and now and then he teased a woman of his acquaintance with a delightfully worded description of his ideal of a wife.  If the woman thereafter carelessly indicated the possession of the desired qualities in herself, Peter saw that, too, but she never knew it, and never saw him laughing at her.  She went on for a month or two dressing brilliantly for his carefully chaperoned little dinners, listening absorbed to his dissertations upon Japanese prints or draperies from Peshawar, until Peter grew tired and drew off, when she must put a brave face upon it and do her share to show that she realized that the little game was over.

He had not been entirely without feminine companionship, however, during the half-century of his life as a man.  Everybody knew something—­and suspected a great deal more—­of various friendships of his.  Even the girls knew that Peter Pomeroy was not over-cautious in the management of his affairs, but they did not like him the less, nor did their mothers find him less eligible, in a matrimonial sense.  Sometimes he met the older women’s hints quite seriously, with brief allusions to some “little girl” who was always as sweet and deserving and virtuous as his own fatherly interference in her affairs was disinterested and kind.  “I did what I could for her—­risking what might or might not be said,” Mr. Pomeroy might add, with a hero’s modest smile and shrug.  And if nobody ever believed him, at least nobody ever challenged him.