Sibyl had a “set,” which was very gay and overflowed with parties where cards were played for favors, and in little dances which were said to be very “select.” Gay debonair men and handsomely dressed women attended these dances and parties and made life one never-ending round of merriment. Mary thought she had never known what it was to really live until now. Sibyl delighted in her; the girl’s fresh flower-like face and inevitable gaucherie set off and added to Sibyl’s own attractiveness. Mary wrote to her father with religious regularity every Sunday. Sunday was a religious day, and the writing of a letter to her father was performed almost as a sacred duty, so that Sunday seemed the appropriate day for it. She wrote also to Ben Davison, more fully than to her father, describing to him the joys of her new mode of life, and appealing to him not to be “savage” about her comments concerning some of the young men she met. “Dear Ben,” she said in one of her letters, “Sibyl Dudley is a perfect darling. I am surprised that you didn’t know she had been married. I thought you knew all the time. She is divorced now, I think, though she never says anything to me about it. I’m sure there must be a beautiful romance in her life, as lovely as any of those Pearl reads, for sometimes when she thinks I’m busy she sits for a long time perfectly silent, as if thinking of something serious. But in spite of that she is as gay and happy as can be. Yes, she is a darling; and so are you, you old grumpy, grizzly bear! I wish you could send me a pony—not a broncho! It would be such fun to go galloping on my own pony through the streets. I ride a good deal, but these Denver horses are such big things. Mrs. Dudley is a superb horsewoman. Is that right, horsewoman?—it sounds funny, worse than cowboy. Sometimes when we meet people she introduces me as her niece, and the people smile and say how much we look alike. Isn’t that funny, too?” Sibyl abounded in “charities,” and had numbers of feeble men and old women who devoutly, or otherwise, blest her shadow as she passed. Under her tutelage Mary also found it pleasant to play Lady Bountiful. It gave her quite as much comfort as the penning of that Sunday letter to her father. Her father had lived a saving and scrimping life and had never given anything to anybody, so that to Mary this was an entirely new and pleasing phase of life’s conduct. It made her feel so superior to bestow with unstinting hand, and be blest for the largess, as if the donor were a veritable gift-showering angel, or luxury-distributing fairy, with red gold on her wings.