Waterville would have been sorry to give a false idea of his interest in the wonderful woman; he knew too well the feeling had definite limits. He had been two or three times to see her, but it was a relief to be able to believe her quite independent of him. There had been no revival of those free retorts which had marked their stay at Longlands. She could dispense with assistance now; she knew herself in the current of success. She pretended to be surprised at her good fortune, especially at its rapidity; but she was really surprised at nothing. She took things as they came and, being essentially a woman of action, wasted almost as little time in elation as she would have done in despondence. She talked a great deal about Lord Edward and Lady Margaret and such others of that “standing” as had shown a desire for her acquaintance; professing to measure perfectly the sources of a growing popularity. “They come to laugh at me,” she said; “they come simply to get things to repeat. I can’t open my mouth but they burst into fits. It’s a settled thing that I’m a grand case of the American funny woman; if I make the least remark they begin to roar. I must express myself somehow; and indeed when I hold my tongue they think me funnier than ever. They repeat what I say to a great person, and a great person told some of them the other night that he wanted to hear me for himself. I’ll do for him what I do for the others; no better and no worse. I don’t know how I do it; I talk the only way I can. They tell me it isn’t so much the things I say as the way I say them. Well, they’re very easy to please. They don’t really care for me, you know—they don’t love me for myself and the way I want to be loved; it’s only to be able to repeat Mrs. Headway’s ‘last.’ Every one wants to have it first; it’s a regular race.” When she found what was expected of her she undertook to supply the article in abundance—the poor little woman worked hard at the vernacular. If the taste of London lay that way she would do her best to gratify it; it was only a pity she hadn’t known before: she would have made more extensive preparations. She had thought it a disadvantage of old to live in Arizona, in Dakotah, in the newly-admitted States; but now she saw that, as she phrased it to herself, this was the best thing that ever had happened to her. She tried to recover the weird things she had heard out there, and keenly regretted she hadn’t taken them down in writing; she drummed up the echoes of the Rocky Mountains and practised the intonations of the Pacific slope. When she saw her audience in convulsions she argued that this was success: she inferred that had she only come five years sooner she might have married a Duke. That would have been even a greater attraction for the London world than the actual proceedings of Sir Arthur Demesne, who, however, lived sufficiently in the eye of society to