My friend, Ida Van Arsdel, was a serious, large-minded, large-brained woman, who had laid a deep and comprehensive plan of life, and was adhering to it with a patient and silent perseverance. Still she had no sympathy in that class of society where her lot was cast. Her mother and her Aunt Maria were women who lived and breathed merely in the opinions of their set and circle, and were as incapable of considering any higher ideal of life, or any unworldly purpose, as two canary-birds. Mr. Van Arsdel, a quiet, silent man, possessed a vein of good sense which led him to appreciate his eldest daughter at her real worth; and he was not insensible to the pleasure of having one feminine companion who, as he phrased it, "understood business," and with whom he could talk and advise understandingly. But even he had no sympathy with those larger views of the wants and needs of womanhood, in view of which Ida was acting. It followed very naturally that as Ida got no sympathy in her own circle, she was led to seek it in the widening sphere of modern reformers--a circle in which so much that is fine and excellent and practical, is inevitably mixed with a great deal that is crude and excessive. At her request I accompanied her and Eva one evening to a sort of New-Dispensation _salon_, which was held weekly at the house of Mrs. Stella Cerulean. Mrs. Stella Cerulean was a brilliant woman--beautiful in person, full of genius, full of enthusiasm, full of self-confidence, the most charming of talkers, and the most fascinating of women. Her career from early life had been one of those dazzling successes which always fall to the lot of beauty, seconded by a certain amount of tact and genius. Of both these gifts Mrs. Cerulean had just enough to bewilder the head of any gentleman who made her acquaintance. She had in her girlhood made the tour of Europe, shone as a star in the courts of France and Russia, and might be excused for a more than ordinary share of complacency in her successes. In common with handsome women generally, she had, during the greater part of her life, never heard anything but flattery from gentlemen, and it always agreed with her remarkably well. But Mrs. Cerulean was one of those women, with just intellect and genius enough to render her impatient of the mere common-place triumphs of beauty. She felt the intoxicating power of the personal influence which she possessed, and aspired to reign in the region of the mind as well as to charm the senses. She felt herself called to the modern work of society regeneration, and went into it with all the enthusiasm of her nature, and with all that certainty of success which comes from an utter want of practical experience. Problems which old statesmen contemplated with perplexity, which had been the despair of ages, she took up with a cheerful alacrity.