Her room was large, filled with chairs and tables, lamps and cushions, silver trays and lacquer boxes, vases and jars and bowls, gift books and current magazines. There was not an unbroken inch of surface anywhere, the walls were closely set with pictures of all sorts. Along the old-fashioned mantel, a scalloped, narrow shelf of marble, was a crowding line of photographs in silver frames, and there were other framed photographs all about the room. There were the young mothers of the late eighties, seated to best display their bustles and their French twists, with heavy-headed infants in their tightly cased arms, and there were children's pictures, babes in shells, in swings, or leaning on gates. There were three Annies: one in ringlets, plaid silk, and tasselled boots, at eight; one magnificent in drawing-room plumes; and a recent one, a cloudy study of the severely superb mother, with a sleek-headed, wide-collared boy on each side of her. There was a photograph of the son Theodore, handsome, sullen, dressed in the fashion of the opening century, and there was more than one of Theodore's daughter, the last of the Melroses. Leslie had been a wide-eyed, sturdy little girl who carried a perpetually surprised, even a babyish expression into her teens, but her last pictures showed the débutante, the piquant and charming eighteen-year-old, whose knowingly tipped hat and high fur collar left only a glimpse of pretty and pouting face between. Leslie came in upon her grandmother at about three o'clock. She was genuinely tired, after an athletic morning at the club, a luncheon amid a group of chattering intimates, and a walk with the young man whose attentions to her were thrilling not only her grandmother and aunts, but the cool-blooded little Leslie herself. Acton Liggett was Christopher's only brother, only relative indeed, and promised already to be as great a favourite as the irresistible Chris himself. Both were rich, both fine-looking, straightforward, honourable men, proud of their own integrity, their long-established family, and their old firm. Acton was pleasantly at home in the Melrose, Liggett, and Von Behrens houses, the very maids loved him, and his quiet singling out of Leslie for his devotion had satisfied everyone's sense of what was fitting and delightful. Pretty Leslie, back from a summer's idling with Aunt Annie and the little boys, in California and Hawaii, had found Acton's admiration waiting for her, with all the other joys of her débutante winter. And even the critical Aunt Annie had to admit that the little minx was managing the whole matter with consummate skill. Leslie was not in the least self-conscious with Acton; she turned to him with all the artless confidence of a little sister. She asked him about her dancing partners, and about her gowns, and she discussed with him all the various bits of small gossip that concerned their own friends.