The two women were Rachael and Carol Breckenridge, who came in a little breathless, the throbbing engine of their motor car still sounding faintly from the direction of the club doorway.  Carol, a slender, black-eyed, dusky-skinned girl of seventeen, took her place beside Miss Sartoris on the fender, granting a brief unsmiling nod to one or two friends, and eying the group between the loose locks of her smoky, cropped black hair with the inscrutable, almost brooding, expression that was her favorite affectation.  Her lithe, loosely built little body was as flat as a boy’s, she clasped her crossed knees with slender, satin-smooth little brown hands, exposing by her attitude a frill of embroidered petticoat, a transparent stretch of ash-gray silk stocking, and smart ash-gray buckskin slippers with silver buckles.

She was an effective little figure in the mingled twilight and firelight, but it was toward her beautiful stepmother that everybody looked as Rachael Breckenridge seated herself on the arm of old Mrs. Torrence’s chair and sent a careless greeting about the circle.

“Hello, everybody!” she said, in a voice of extraordinary richness and sweetness, “Peter, Dolly, Vivian—­hello, Elinor!  How do you do, Mrs. Emory?” There was an aside when the newcomer said imperatively to a club attendant, “We’ll have some light here, please!” Then she resumed easily:  “I do beg your pardon, Mrs. Emory, I interrupted you—­”

“I only said that you were a little late for tea,” said Mrs. Emory, sweetly, wishing with a sort of futile rage that she could learn to say almost nothing when this other woman, with her insulting bright air of making one feel inferior, was about.  The Emorys had lived in Belvedere Hills for two years, coming from Denver with much money and irrefutable credentials.  They had been members of the club perhaps half that time, members in good standing.  But Mrs. Emory would have paid a large sum to have Rachael Breckenridge call her “Belle,” and Rachael Breckenridge knew it.

The lights, duly poured in a soft flood from all sides of the room, revealed in Mrs. Breckenridge one of those beauties that an older generation of diarists and letter writers frankly spelled with a capital letter as distinguishing her charms from those of a thousand of lesser degree.  When such beauty is unaccompanied by intellect it is a royal dower, and its possessor may serenely command half a century of unquestioning adoration from the sons of men, and all the good things of life as well.

But when there is a soul behind the matchless eyes, and a keen wit animates the lovely mouth, and when the indication of the white forehead is not belied, it is a nice question whether great beauty be a gift of benign or malicious fairies.  Not a woman in this room or in any room she entered could look at Rachael Breckenridge without a pang; her supremacy was beyond all argument or dispute.  And yet there was neither complacency nor content in the lovely face; it wore its usual expression of arrogant amusement at a somewhat tiresome world.