When I perceived the Halls corraled by this well-known personage, I shamelessly moved closer so that I could overhear what was being said. This was little enough on the part of the two Halls. Mrs. Hall smiled silently down on her short and majestic interlocutor. Mr. Hall's strongly marked face was inscrutable. However, the great lady was quite used to respectful attention from those of her excompatriots with whom she deigned to converse, and she continued to talk with her habitual certainty of herself. At the moment when I came within earshot, she was retailing to them exactly how many hundreds of wounded heroes had passed through "her" hands to their eternal benefit; exactly the praises the Minister of War had given her when her red ribbon was bestowed; exactly how she had attacked and driven from the field a Spanish lady of wealth who had had the presumption also to attempt to aid one-armed and tubercular soldiers; how imitators had tried to "steal" her methods of outdoor work for the tubercular, and how she had defeated their fell purpose by allowing no more visitors to that institution without a card from her personally.... At this point my attention was called away by an acquaintance who asked me in a whisper if those people whom the Duchesse had so ruthlessly grabbed were really the extravagantly rich and queer Americans everybody was talking about, attached to no institution, who gave as they pleased, dodging recognition and decorations, mavericks of the fashionable war-relief world, breaking all the time-honored traditions of that society. When I could resume my eavesdropping, the Duchesse was embarked upon her snuffboxes, graciously dropping down from the pinnacle of her lofty exclusiveness an actual invitation to the two nobodies before her to call on her and see that world-famed collection, comprising snuffboxes used by the Duc de Talleyrand, the Duc de St. Simon, the Marquis de la Rochefoucauld.... About this time I detected an inward glow in Mr. Hall's steady eyes. He said grimly, "I don't happen to be acquainted with any of those gentlemen, but in our country snuff-taking is accounted a rather low form of amusing yourself." The Duchesse was brought up short, not in the least by any intimation that she might not be extracting her usual due of admiration, but by a great desire to laugh at the unsophistication of the barbarians. For my part I went warm all over with cheerfulness, and stepped forward to present my cordial greetings to the Halls. Mrs. Hall soon fell back a step or two with me, leaving Mr. Hall looking down severely on the jewel-covered woman before him. There was a shade of anxiety on Mrs. Hall's usually clear face. "You don't suppose," she murmured to me, "that Robert will be taken in by that horrid, common old woman and give some money to her? Men are so blind, even the best of them!"