So I come to the time when this haughty lady was humbled; that is to say, the time of her meeting with Frank Shirley. Because it was through Harriet Atkinson that she came to know him, I must first tell you in a few words about that active and pushing young lady. Harriet Atkinson was the one weak spot in the fortifications of respectability which Sylvia’s parents had built up about her. Harriet’s ancestors were Yankees, of the very most odious “carpet-bag” type. Her grandfather had been a pawnbroker in Boston, so fierce rumor declared; and her father was a street-railroad president, who purchased “red-neck” legislators for use in his business. Harriet herself was a brunette beauty, so highly colored that she looked artificial, no matter how hard she tried to look natural. But in spite of these appalling facts, Harriet Atkinson was the most intelligent girl whom Sylvia had met during her three years at the “college.” She had a wit that was irresistible, and also she understood people. You might spend weeks in her company and never be bored; whereas there were persons who could prove possession of the “very best blood in the South,” but who were capable of boring you most frightfully when they got you alone for half an hour. Sylvia was never allowed to go to Harriet’s home, nor was Harriet ever asked to Castleman Hall. But Sylvia refused to give up her friend, and for a year she intrigued incessantly to force Harriet upon her hostesses, and to persuade her own suitors to call at the Atkinson home. In the end she married her off to the scion of a great family—with consequences which are to be told at a later stage of my story. The point for the present is that things happened exactly as Sylvia’s aunts had predicted; through her intimacy with the undesirable Harriet Atkinson she was “exposed” to the acquaintance of several undesirable men, among them Frank Shirley. Sylvia had known about the Shirleys from earliest childhood. She had heard the topic talked about at the family dinner-table, and had seen tears in her father’s eyes when the final tragedy came. For the Shirleys were among the “best people,” and this was not the kind of thing which was allowed to happen to such. About twelve years previously the legislature had appropriated money for the building of a veterans’ home, and the funds had been entrusted to a committee, of which Robert Shirley was treasurer. The project had lapsed for a couple of years, and when the money was called for, Robert Shirley was unable to produce it. Rumors leaked out, and there came a demand in the legislature for an accounting.