"The commission will hold meetings. They will be public to the applicants. Nobody else, excepting male reporters, will be allowed to be present. And you might add, gentlemen, that the commission considers the requirements for success so uncommon as to render unnecessary the lease of the Madison Square Garden to hold the candidates. The sessions will be held in a room not much larger than this room. And," added the diabolic H. R., "we have no fear of overcrowding. They have to be _perfectly beautiful girls_, beautifully perfect. Now, don't quote me, boys, but you might print, as a report on good authority, that the only one thus far chosen is Miss Grace Goodchild!" Though all reporters are human, most of them are grateful. They duly published the "rumor" and Grace's latest photographs. XX Long before the tea was over, Grace Goodchild, two miles north of him, realized that H. R. was one of those detestable persons who are always right. A dozen of her intimates surrounded her in the Dutch room. They all talked at once. When eleven stopped for lack of breath the twelfth, who very cleverly had saved hers, asked: "Did they really pick you out, Grace?" The speaker was not perfectly beautiful. But she was wise and therefore a virgin. "No!" said Grace. "But really, I don't want to have anything to do with it." "If Hendrik was _my_ Hendrik, I'd be _It_," said the wise virgin, determinedly, "or he'd know it!" "He told me," Grace spoke modestly, "that only perfectly beautiful girls would be chosen. And so of course that lets me out!" "Oh-h-h-h!" came in chorus. There ensued much whispering. Grace flushed. No woman likes to be accused of mendacity monosyllabically. It made her dislike H. R. more than ever. "Does your father," asked the wise one, "still oppose--" "He does," answered Grace. Then she added, "Of course." "I think your father--" And the wise one bit her lips. You would have thought she was snipping off thread with her teeth. A well-bred person must do this oftener than a seamstress--to keep herself from telling the truth. "_My_ father," tactfully observed Marion Molyneux, "could oppose until the cows came home." "Mamma is on the commission and I'm not eligible, so _I_ am not after his vote," said Ethel Vandergilt. "But I'd love to meet him, Grace. Is he all they say he is?" Grace Goodchild for the first time began to realize that H. R. was a remarkable man. She realized it by the simple expedient of disliking Ethel. "Is it true that he'll do anything you tell him?" cut in Cynthia Coleman, enviously. She was a very pretty girl, with the absurd doll face that makes men feel so manly. She had brains. A girl with that face always has. She shows it by never showing them. The face does the trick more quickly. Grace said, calmly, "H. R. never--" "Oh, girls, she calls him H. R., too!" exclaimed Marion.