The Lady of Difficult Occasions--such was the title conferred upon Mrs. John McCandless Blair by Dick Wingfield--looked less than her thirty-two years. A slender, nervous woman, Mrs. Blair had contributed from early girlhood to the picturesqueness of life in her city. Her interests were many and varied; she did what she liked and was supremely indifferent to criticism. She wore colours that no other woman would have dared; for colour, she maintained, possesses the strongest psychical significance, and to keep in tune with things infinite one’s wardrobe must reflect the rainbow. She had tried all extant religions and had revived a number long considered obsolete; her garret was a valhalla of discarded gods. One day the scent of joss-sticks clung to the draperies of her library, the next she dipped her finger boldly in the holy water font at the door of the Catholic cathedral and sent a subscription to the Little Sisters of the Poor. She appeared fitfully in the Blair pew at Memorial Presbyterian Church, where her father was ruling elder and her husband passed the plate; and Memorial, we may say, was the most fashionable house of prayer and worship in town, frowning down severely upon the Allequippa Club over the way. “Fanny Blair is sure of heaven,” Dick Wingfield said, “for she has tickets to all the gates.” Mrs. Blair was generous in her quixotic fashion; her husband had inherited wealth, and he was, moreover, a successful lawyer, who admired her immensely and encouraged her foibles. She dressed her twin boys after portraits of the Stuart princes, and their velvet and long curls caused many riots at the public school they attended--sent there, she said, that they might grow up strong in the democratic spirit. When they had adjourned to the library Mrs. Blair spoke in practical ways of the new wife’s home-coming. She tendered her own services in any changes her father wished in the house. Some of her mother’s personal belongings she frankly stated her purpose to remove. They were things that did not, to Colonel Craighill’s masculine mind, seem particularly interesting or valuable. Wayne grew restless as his father and sister considered these matters. He moved about idly, throwing in a word now and then when Mrs. Blair appealed to him directly. Evenings at home had become unusual events, and domestic affairs bored him. Mrs. Blair was, however, sensitive to his moods and she continued her efforts to hold him within the circle of their talk. “Don’t you think a reception--something large and general--would be a good thing at the start, Wayne?” “Yes; oh, yes, by all means,” he replied, looking up from a publisher’s advertisement that he had been reading.