With this, we separated, for we could hear Mrs. Ess Kay's voice in the corridor, talking to Sally Woodburn on the way downstairs. Her voice is never difficult to hear; rather the other way; and Miss Woodburn's soft little drawl following it, reminded me of a spoonful of Devonshire cream after a bunch of currants. Mother was with them both in the oak drawing-room when Vic and I got down, and I found myself staring at Mrs. Ess Kay with a new kind of criticism in my mind; indeed, it hadn't occurred to me before to criticise at all. I'd only felt that I didn't want to come any closer to her. Now I was to come much closer, it seemed, and I looked at the glittering lady, wondering how it would feel to be so close--wondering what _she_ herself was. Outside, she's more like the biggest and most splendid dressmaker's model ever made for a Paris show-window than anything else I can think of; at least, she is like that from under her chin down to the tips of her toes. I say under her chin, for that feature, as well as all the others above it, are miles removed from a pretty, wax lady in a show-window. I never supposed till I met Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox, that a live woman could have a figure exactly like the fashion-plates, swelling like a tidal wave above an hourglass of a waist, and retreating far, far into the dim perspective below it, then suddenly bulging out behind like a round, magnificent knoll, after a deep curve inward under the shoulders. But Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox's figure does all these things even when she stands still, and a great many more when she walks, which act she accomplishes in a grand, sweepy kind of a way, with her head a little thrown back, as if she wants everybody to know that she is tremendously important in the scheme, not only of the world, but of the universe.