However, he took good care, too, that due prominence should be given on every hand to Rue’s own personal claims to social distinction. He was a first-rate wire-puller. Little notes about the beauty, the wealth, the cleverness, and the fine taste of the pretty American widow cropped up spasmodically in _Truth_ and the _Pall Mall_. Even the _Spectator_ itself, that high-and-dry organ of intellectual life, deigned to recognise her existence. It was Florian’s intention, in short, to float his new _protégée_. Now, all the world admitted that Florian, if he chose, could float almost anybody; while Rue, for her part, was without doubt exceptionally easy of flotation. Seven hundred thousand pounds, to say the truth, would have buoyed up a far heavier social subject than the pretty and clever New Yorker. Americans are the fashion; for a woman, at least, the mere fact that she comes from beyond the mill-pond is in itself just at present a passport to the best society. But Rue had also money; and money in these days will admit anyone anywhere. Furthermore, she had good looks, taking manners, much culture, real cleverness. She was well informed and well read; Society itself, that collective critic, could find nothing to criticise or to carp at in her conversation. So, introduced by Florian on one side, and His Excellency the American Minister on the other, Rue made that spring a perfect triumphal progress through the London drawing-rooms. She was the fact of the season; she entertained in her own pretty rooms in Hans Place, where Florian exhibited his decorative skill with bland satisfaction to dowager-marchionesses,—“I edited it,” was his pet phrase—while Will Deverill hung modestly in the background by the door, talking, as was his wont, to those neglected souls who seemed to him most in need of encouragement and companionship. Before two months were out, everybody was talking of Rue as “our new acquisition.” It was Mrs Palmer this, and Mrs Palmer that. “We understand Mrs Palmer will not be present at the Duchess of Thingumabob’s dance on Tuesday.” “Among the guests on the Terrace, we noticed Lord So-and-so, Lady What’s-her-name of Ware, and Mrs Palmer of New York, whose pretty house in Hans Place is fast becoming a rallying point for all that is most interesting in London Society.” Old Miss Beard, indeed, when she arrived at the Langham Hotel early in May, and found Rue in quiet possession of the Very Best Houses, was positively scandalised. She declared, with a little sneer, it was perfectly disgraceful the way That Woman had forced herself by pure brass on the English Aristocracy. The widow of a dry-goodsman to give herself such airs!—but there, Miss Beard had begun to despair before now of the future of Europe! The Nobility and Gentry of England had degringolated. For true blue blood, she was perfectly convinced, you could only look nowadays to the heirs of the Puritans, the Knickerbockers, and the Virginians.