Miss Haviland must have been about thirty when I first saw her. She was tall, handsome in an angular way. Her face was large, her features regular, though somewhat heavy, her coloring brilliant, and her dark hair grayish even then. She was of a stocky leanness, a ruggedness indigenous to northern New England—and perhaps she did “come” from New England; wanderers from those climes can flourish so prodigiously, you know—which only made her pretentious garb and manner the more conspicuous. To see her at those college parties! She wore black evening-gowns, and a string—a “rope,” I think you could call it—of imitation pearls, and carried a fan always, and a loose wrap with some bright lining, and fur on the neck and sleeves, which she’d just throw, as if carelessly, over her shoulders. We used irreverently to say that she had “corrupted” (one of her favorite words) the premise of the old motto, “When you’re in Rome” to “Whether or not you’re in Rome,” so did she insist on being—or trying to be—incongruously _grande dame_ and not “of” the _milieu_ she was privileged to adorn. Without ever letting herself mix with those gatherings really, she’d show her condescension by choosing a place in the most mixing group, and there carry out her aloofness by just smiling and peering reservedly at—at the way a man set a glass of water upon the table, for instance, as if that constituted enough to judge him by; as if he’d laid his soul, also, sufficiently bare to her in the process. And she must have been, as you’ve seen, a resourceful observer; she had a gift for reacting from people; though how much depended upon the people and what they did and said, and how much upon what she unconsciously—or consciously—adapted from Hurrell Oaks while she gauged them, is a question. The result at least fits the needs of a gaping public. But I’m drifting. All this—in fact, everything about her—took George Norton by storm when he turned up, fresh from a freshwater university farther west, to fill the Slocum professorship. He found in her the splendor that he’d been stranded away from in “real life,” and had never had time or imagination to find in books. She represented great, glorious things beyond his ken—civilization, culture, society, foreign lands across the sea for which his appetite had been whetted by the holiday tour he took to Bermuda after getting his A.B. with highest honors in history and government. He was about forty or so, and lived alone with his mother.