Enlightenment as to the identity of these disturbing persons came, the next day, from an unexpected source.  Indeed, from Mrs. Tyler.  She loved brides, she said, and Honora seemed to her such a sweet bride.  It was Mrs. Tyler’s ambition to become thin (which was hitching her wagon to a star with a vengeance), and she invited our heroine to share her constitutional on the porch.  Honora found the proceeding in the nature of an ordeal, for Mrs. Tyler’s legs were short, her frizzled hair very blond, and the fact that it was natural made it seem, somehow, all the more damning.

They had scarcely begun to walk before Honora, with a sense of dismay of which she was ashamed, beheld some of the people who had occupied her thoughts come out of the door and form a laughing group at the end of the porch.  She could not rid herself of the feeling that they were laughing at her.  She tried in vain to drive them from her mind, to listen to Mrs. Tyler’s account of how she, too, came as a bride to New York from some place with a classical name, and to the advice that accompanied the narration.  The most conspicuous young woman in the group, in riding clothes, was seated on the railing, with the toe of one boot on the ground.  Her profile was clear-cut and her chestnut hair tightly knotted behind under her hat.  Every time they turned, this young woman stared at Honora amusedly.

“Nasty thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Tyler, suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of a description of the delights of life in the metropolis.

“Who?” asked Honora.

“That young Mrs. Freddy Maitland, sitting on the rail.  She’s the rudest woman in New York.”

A perversity of spirit which she could not control prompted Honora to reply: 

“Why, I think she is so good-looking, Mrs. Tyler.  And she seems to have so much individuality and independence.”

“There!” cried Mrs. Tyler, triumphantly.  “Once—­not so very long ago—­I was just as inexperienced as you, my dear.  She belongs to that horribly fast set with which no self-respecting woman would be seen.  It’s an outrage that they should come to a hotel like this and act as though it belonged to them.  She knows me quite as well as I know her, but when I am face to face she acts as though I was air.”

Honora could not help thinking that this, at least, required some imagination on Mrs. Maitland’s part.  Mrs. Tyler had stopped for breath.

“I have been introduced to her twice,” she continued, “but of course I wouldn’t speak to her.  The little man with the lisp, next to her, who is always acting in that silly way, they call Toots Cuthbert.  He gets his name in the newspapers by leading cotillons in New York and Newport.  And the tall, slim, blond one, with the green hat and the feather in it, is Jimmy Wing.  He’s the son of James Wing, the financier.”

“I went to school at Sutcliffe with his sister,” said Honora.

It seemed to Honora that Mrs. Tyler’s manner underwent a change.