Pierce Phillips had said little during the meal or thereafter, to be sure, nevertheless, he had thought much.  He had indeed used his eyes to good purpose, and now he regretted exceedingly that the evening promised to be so short.  The more he saw of this unconventional countess the more she intrigued his interest.  She was the most unusual woman he had ever met and he was eager to learn all about her.  His knowledge of women was peculiarly elemental; his acquaintance with the sex was extremely limited.  Those he had known in his home town were one kind, a familiar kind; those he had encountered since leaving home were, for the most part, of a totally different class and of a type that awoke his disapproval.  To a youth of his training and of his worldly experience the genus woman is divided into two species—­old women and young women.  The former are interesting only in a motherly way, and demand nothing more than abstract courtesy.  They do not matter.  The latter, on the contrary, separate themselves again into two families or suborders—­viz., good women and bad women.  The demarcation between the two branches of the suborder is distinct; there is nothing common to the two.  Good women are good through and through—­bad ones are likewise thoroughly bad.  There are no intermediate types, no troublesome variations, no hybrids nor crosses.

The Countess Courteau, it seemed to him, was a unique specimen and extremely hard to classify, in that she was neither old nor young--or, what was even more puzzling, in that she was both.  In years she was not far advanced—­little older than he, in fact—­but in experience, in wisdom, in self-reliance she was vastly his superior; and experience, he believed, is what makes women old.  As to the family, the suborder to which she belonged, he was at an utter loss to decide.  For instance, she accepted her present situation with a sang-froid equaling that of a camp harpy, a few of whom Pierce had seen; then, too, she was, or had been, married to a no-account foreigner to whom she referred with a calloused and most unwifely flippancy; moreover, she bore herself with a freedom, a boldness, quite irreconcilable to the modesty of so-called “good women.”  Those facts were enough to classify her definitely, and yet despite them she was anything but common, and it would have taken rare courage indeed to transgress that indefinable barrier of decorum with which she managed to surround herself.  There was something about her as cold and as pure as blue ice, and she gave the same impression of crystal clarity.  All in all, hers was a baffling personality and Phillips fell asleep with the riddle of it unanswered.  He awoke in the morning with it still upon his mind.

The Countess Courteau had been first to arise; she was fully dressed and the sheet-iron stove was glowing when her companions roused themselves.  By the time they had returned from the lake she had breakfast ready.

“Old Jerry is going to be awful sore at missing this court function,” Mr. Linton told her during the meal.  “He’s a great ladies’ man, Old Jerry is.”