described to those whose happy lot in life has never been to have made the acquaintance of Mrs. Rindge’s humbler sisters who have acquired—­more coarsely, it is true—­the same camaraderie?  She was one of those for whom, seemingly, sex does not exist.  Her air of good-fellowship with men was eloquent of a precise knowledge of what she might expect from them, and she was prepared to do her own policing,—­not from any deep moral convictions.  She belonged, logically, to that world which is disposed to take the law into its own hands, and she was the possessor of five millions of dollars.

“I came along,” she said to Honora, as she gave her hand-bag to a footman.  “I hope you don’t mind.  Abby and I were shopping and we ran into Hugh and Georgie yesterday at Sherry’s, and we’ve been together ever since.  Not quite that—­but almost.  Hugh begged us to come up, and there didn’t seem to be any reason why we shouldn’t, so we telephoned down to Banbury for our trunks and maids, and we’ve played bridge all the way.  By the way, Georgie, where’s my pocket-book?”

Mr. Pembroke handed it over, and was introduced by Hugh.  He looked at Honora, and his glance somehow betokened that he was in the habit of looking only once.  He had apparently made up his mind about her before he saw her.  But he looked again, evidently finding her at variance with a preconceived idea, and this time she flushed a little under his stare, and she got the impression that Mr. Pembroke was a man from whom few secrets of a certain kind were hid.  She felt that he had seized, at a second glance, a situation that she had succeeded in hiding from the women.  He was surprised, but cynically so.  He was the sort of person who had probably possessed at Harvard the knowledge of the world of a Tammany politician; he had long ago written his book—­such as it was—­and closed it:  or, rather, he had worked out his system at a precocious age, and it had lasted him ever since.  He had decided that undergraduate life, freed from undergraduate restrictions, was a good thing.  And he did not, even in these days, object to breaking something valuable occasionally.

His physical attributes are more difficult to describe, so closely were they allied to those which, for want of a better word, must be called mental.  He was neither tall nor short, he was well fed, but hard, his shoulders too broad, his head a little large.  If he should have happened to bump against one, the result would have been a bruise—­not for him.  His eyes were blue, his light hair short, and there was a slight baldness beginning; his face was red-tanned.  There was not the slightest doubt that he could be effectively rude, and often was; but it was evident, for some reason, that he meant to be gracious (for Mr. Pembroke) to Honora.  Perhaps this was the result of the second glance.  One of his name had not lacked, indeed, for instructions in gentility.  It must not be thought that she was in a condition to care much about what Mr. Pembroke thought or did, and yet she felt instinctively that he had changed his greeting between that first and second glance.