She was a woman with an intimidating coldness of manner. This manner spoke without words of an incorruptible intolerance toward all deviations from her code. Backsliders, moral culprits, unmannerly persons and, in fact, everyone not actively under her domination were, to Mrs. Gilchrist, suspect. She managed to give the impression that people whom she did not know were creatures whose virtues as well as social prestige were matters of sinister doubt. They were outside the pale. The secret of her domination was a psychological phenomenon that eluded her antagonists and so left them powerless to combat it. The strength Mrs. Gilchrist felt within her was the product of a complete repression. She had managed since her youth to shut herself successfully within the narrow limits of her consciousness, successfully divorcing all her thoughts, desires and actions from any dictates of an inner self. She had formed an ideal, basing it upon her social ambitions and her childish prejudices of good and bad, desirable and undesirable. And she had been able to perfect this ideal. Her mind was a tiny fortress against which her own emotions and hence the emotions of others battled in vain. It could neither think nor understand and this was its strength. The doubts which thinking sometimes stirred in the minds of her antagonists, the knowledge of secret impulses and obscene imaginings which they were able only imperfectly to keep from themselves and which made it possible for them to appreciate dimly the sinners and iconoclasts in the world--such knowledge never intruded upon Mrs. Gilchrist. Her indignation toward backsliders and moral culprits was not a projected censure of similar weakness in herself. There were no windows in the tiny fortress in which she lived. Protected from all human disturbances of her spirit, she spent her days closeted within her little fortress in grim contemplation of her rectitude. Friendship was impossible to her. She was, however, a duchy, a corporation in which one could buy stock. By subscribing unquestionably to her rectitude, admitting its existence publicly and succumbing to its strength, one earned the dividends of her social approval. One became to her a very nice person in whose submission she grudgingly saw, as in an imperfect mirror, the image of her own virtues.