“You certainly are just perfect,” said the adoring Selina, not the least part of her admiring satisfaction due to the fact that the toilette was largely the creation of her own hands.  “And you smell like a real lady—­not noisy, like some that comes here.  I hate to touch their wraps or to lay ’em down in the house.  But you—­It’s one of them smells that you ain’t sure whether you smelt it or dreamed it.”

“Pretty good, Selina!” said Margaret.  She could not but be pleased with such a compliment, one that could have been suggested only by the truth.  “The hair went up well this morning, didn’t it?”

“Lovely—­especially in the back.  It looks as if it had been marcelled, without that common, barbery stiffness-like.”

“Yes, the back is good.  And I like this blouse.  I must wear it oftener.”

“You can’t afford to favor it too much, Miss Rita.  You know you’ve got over thirty, all of them beauties.”

“Some day, when I get time, we must look through my clothes.  I want to give you a lot of them. ...  What does become of the time?  Here it is, nearly eleven.  See if breakfast has come up.  I’ll finish dressing afterward if it has.”

It had.  It was upon a small table in the rose and gold boudoir.  And the sun, shining softly in at the creeper-shaded window, rejoiced in the surpassing brightness and cleanness of the dishes of silver and thinnest porcelain and cut glass.  Margaret thought eating in bed a “filthy, foreign fad,” and never indulged in it.  She seated herself lazily, drank her coffee, and ate her roll and her egg slowly, deliberately, reading her letters and glancing at the paper.  A charming picture she made—­the soft, white Valenciennes of her matinee falling away from her throat and setting off the clean, smooth healthiness of her skin, the blackness of her vital hair; from the white lace of her petticoat’s plaited flounces peered one of her slim feet, a satin slipper upon the end of it.  At the top of the heap of letters lay one she would have recognized, she thought, had she never seen the handwriting before.

“Sure to be upsetting,” reflected she; and she laid it aside, glancing now and then at the bold, nervous, irregular hand and speculating about the contents and about the writer.

She had gone to bed greatly disturbed in mind as to whether she was doing well to marry the obstreperous Westerner.  “He fascinates me in a wild, weird sort of a way when I’m with him,” she had said to herself before going to sleep, “and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods.  And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him—­like broncho-busting.  But is it interesting enough for—­for marriage?  Wouldn’t I get horribly tired?  Wouldn’t Grant and humdrum be better? less wearying?  “And when she awakened she found her problem all but solved.”  I’ll send him packing and take Grant,” she found herself saying, “unless some excellent