Nor, when Mary came to look at her, did the hostess seem out of keeping with her surroundings. To the girl's home Owen Denbigh had once brought a large, lithographed calendar, issued by a brewery, and depicting, at its top, a woman of the elder Teutonic days, very red and white, with long yellow hair, and a body of rounded proportions, which threatened to grind to powder the rock on which she sat, and desperately endangered the filmy garments that enfolded without clothing her. It was of this picture that Mary instantly thought when she got her first full view of Mrs. Légère. The hostess was clad in a long, fluttering, baby-blue kimona, spotted by embroidered white dragons, with sleeves that fell despairingly from her puckered elbows, disclosing thick white arms with rolls of fat at the wrists, and plump hands and fingers the almond shaped nails of which gleamed like the points of daggers. The folds of light silk, held by a large amethyst pin at the base of her sturdy throat, bulged broadly over her capacious breasts and trailed, across frou-frouing lace, far beyond her heels. All this Mary saw first, and then, looking upward across the figure that, literally, overshadowed her, she saw a large, round, good-enough-natured face, surmounting a white double chin. The corn-colored hair was massed in an intricate maze of puffs and coils and braids, which made the girl wonder how much was its owner's natural growth and how much was due to the artifices that Mary had always longed for and had always been denied. The forehead was low and calm; the violet eyes of a more than natural brightness, with crowsfeet beside them and pouches below, only just discernible in lamplight. The brows and lashes were of a blackness that contrasted with the coiffure; the skin, here like snow and there as red as roses, and the full, easy-going mouth as crimson as a wound. Mary thought that here at last was a beautiful woman. "I sure am glad to see you," purred Mrs. Légère, as, having divested the guest of hat and coat, she whisked these into the hall and, returning, again seated herself and fondled the visitor's passive, but flattered, hand between her own extensive, well-cared-for palms. "Max raved about you over the telephone--just raved--and, now that I get to a clinch with you, I begin to think that he knew what he was talking about." Max was seating himself on an orange-colored ottoman opposite them. He grinned broadly, his narrowed lips showing his even, sparkling teeth. "Sure I knew vhat I vas talkin' about," he declared. Mary was not used to compliments, but she was too honest not to show that she liked them. She blushed, and was all the prettier for it; but she did manage to deprecate the sentiments of the better known of her critics. "Mr. Grossman is crazy," she modestly observed.