Lady Dee had handed down the formula: “When in difficulty, look the person in the eyes, and remember who you are.” This was the counsel which came to Sylvia’s rescue at the moment of the dread encounter. She knew Mrs. Winthrop as soon as she caught sight of her; she looked a woman of thirty-five—instead of forty-five, which she really was—tall and slender, undoubtedly beautiful, undoubtedly proud, and yet with a kind of _naïve_ sincerity. They met in the dressing-room by accident, and the lady, recognizing Sylvia, took her hand and gazed into her face; and Sylvia gazed back, with those wide, clear eyes of hers, steadily, unflinching, without a motion or a sound. At last Mrs. Winthrop, putting her other hand upon the girl’s, clasped it and whispered intensely, “We met a thousand years ago!” Sylvia had no information as to any such event, and she had not expected at all that kind of welcome. So she continued to gaze—steadily, steadily. And the spell communicated itself to Mrs. Winthrop. “I heard that you were lovely,” she murmured, in a strange, low voice, “but I really had no idea! Sylvia Castleman, you are like a snow-storm of pear blossoms! You are a Corot symphony of spring time!” Now Sylvia had seen some of Corot’s paintings, but she had not learned to mix the metaphors of the arts, and so she had no idea what Mrs. Winthrop meant. She contented herself with saying something about the pleasure she felt at this meeting. But the other was not to be brought down to mundane speech. “Dryad!” she murmured. She had a manner and voice all her own, sybilline, oracular; you felt that she was speaking, not to you, but to some disembodied spirit. It was very disconcerting at first. “You bring back lost youth to the world,” she said. “I want to talk to you, Sylvia—to find out more about you. You aren’t vain, I know. You are proud!” “Why—I’m not sure,” said Sylvia, at a loss for a moment. “Oh, don’t be vain!” said the lady. “Remember—I was like you once.” Which gave Sylvia an opportunity of the sort she understood. “I will look forward,” she said, “to the prospect of being like you.” The radiant lady pressed her hand. “Very pretty, my child,” she said. “Quite Southern, too! But I must take you in and give the others some of this joy.” Such was the beginning of the acquaintance so utterly different from all possible beginnings, as Sylvia had imagined them. She found in Edith Winthrop, whom she met a few minutes later, a person much nearer to what she had expected in the mother. Miss Edith had her mother’s beauty and her mother’s pride, but no trace of her mother’s sybilline qualities. A badly spoiled young lady, was Sylvia’s first verdict upon this New England _belle_; a verdict which she delivered promptly to her infatuated cousin, and which she never found occasion to revise.