Rhodora Pennington came to Trega with her invalid mother as the guest of her uncle, the Commandant at the Fort—for Trega was a garrison town. She was a beautiful girl. I do not mean a pretty girl: there were pretty girls in Trega—several of them. She was beautiful as the Queen of Sheba was beautiful—grand, perfect, radiantly tawny of complexion, without a flaw or a failing in her pulchritude—almost too fine a being for family use, except that she had plenty of hot woman’s blood in her veins, and was an accomplished, delightful, impartial flirt. All the men turned to her with such prompt unanimity that all the girls of Trega’s best society joined hands in one grand battle for their prospective altars and hearths. From the June day when Rhodora came, to the Ash Wednesday of the next year when her engagement was announced, there was one grand battle, a dozen girls with wealth and social position and knowledge of the ground to help them, all pitted against one garrison girl, with not so much as a mother to back her—Mrs. Pennington being hopelessly and permanently on the sick–list. Trega girls who had never thought of doing more than wait at their leisure for the local young men to marry them at _their_ leisure now went in for accomplishments of every sort. They rode, they drove, they danced new dances, they read Browning and Herbert Spencer, they sang, they worked hard at archery and lawn–tennis, they rowed and sailed and fished, and some of the more desperate even went shooting in the Fall, and in the Winter played billiards and—penny ante. Thus did they, in the language of a somewhat cynical male observer, back Accomplishments against Beauty. The Shakspere Club and the Lake Picnic, which had hitherto divided the year between them, were submerged in the flood of social entertainments. Balls and parties followed one another. Trega’s square stone houses were lit up night after night, and the broad moss–grown gardens about them were made trim and presentable, and Chinese lanterns turned them into a fairy–land for young lovers. [Illustration] It was a great year for Trega! The city had been dead, commercially, ever since the New York Central Railroad had opened up the great West; but the unprecedented flow of champagne and Apollinaris actually started a little business boom, based on the inferable wealth of Trega, and two or three of Trega’s remaining firms went into bankruptcy because of the boom. And Rhodora Pennington did it all. Have you ever seen the end of a sham–fight? You have been shouting and applauding, and wasting enough enthusiasm for a foot–ball match. And now it is all finished, and nothing has been done, and you go home somewhat ashamed of yourself, and glad only that the blue–coated participants must feel more ashamed of themselves; and the smell of the villainous saltpetre, that waked the Berserker in your heart an hour ago, is now noisome and disgusting, and makes you cough and sneeze.