The crown of her loveliness was her unconsciousness of self. Even though she might be talking of herself, frankly admitting her beauty, she was really thinking of other people, how she could get to them to help them. This I must emphasize, because, apart from jesting, I would not have it thought that I had fallen under the spell of a beautiful countenance, combined with a motor-car and a patrician name. There were things about Sylvia that were aristocratic, that could be nothing else; but she could be her same lovely self in a cottage--as I shall prove to you before I finish with the story of her life. I was in love. At that time I was teaching myself German, and I sat one day puzzling out two lines of Goethe: “Oden and Thor, these two thou knowest; Freya, the heavenly, knowest thou not.” And I remember how I cried aloud in sudden delight: _“I know her!”_ For a long time that was one of my pet names--“Freya dis Himmlische!” I only heard of one other that I preferred--when in course of time she told me about Frank Shirley, and how she had loved him, and how their hopes had been wrecked. He had called her “Lady Sunshine”; he had been wont to call it over and over in his happiness, and as Sylvia repeated it to me--“Lady Sunshine! Lady Sunshine!” I could imagine that I caught an echo of the very tones of Frank Shirley’s voice. 10. For several days I waited upon the postman, and when the summons came I dodged a committee-meeting, and ascended the marble stairs with trepidation, and underwent the doubting scrutiny of an English lackey, sufficiently grave in deportment and habiliments to have waited upon a bishop in his own land. I have a vague memory of an entrance-hall with panelled paintings and a double-staircase with a snow-white carpet, about which I had read in the newspapers that it was woven in one piece, and had cost an incredible sum. One did not have to profane it with his feet, as there was an elevator provided. I was shown to Sylvia’s morning-room, which had been “done” in pink and white and gold by some decorator who had known her colours. It was large enough to have held half-a-dozen of my own quarters, and the sun was allowed to flood it. Through a door at one side came Sylvia, holding out her hands to me. She was really glad to see me! She began to apologize at once for the time she had taken to write. It was because she had so much to do. She had married into a world that took itself seriously: the “idle rich,” who worked like slaves. “You know,” she said, while we sat on a pink satin couch, and a footman brought us coffee: “you read that Mrs. So-and-so is a ‘social queen,’ and you think it’s a newspaper phrase, but it isn’t; she really feels that she’s a queen, and other people feel it, and she goes through her ceremonies as solemnly as the Lord’s anointed.”