There, walking along quietly in morning coat, a slouching, keen-eyed young fellow; a flutter as he passes. "See, Audrey! Lord Golderly. Evie, bow; did you not see Lord Golderly?" Or from more intimate friends: "Sukey! There's Joss. Call him over! He's thinner than ever! Mum! there's Jossy! Ask him to our little dinner--he might come." The Marquis of Golderly, with eighty thousand a year, with a panelled house in Yorkshire, a castle in Scotland, with Golderly House in Piccadilly--let now to rich Americans--had strolled by. A pleasant-looking, well-made boy, with his mind full of his new polo pony, and not in the least interested in the Ladies Evie and Audrey, or in his cousin Sukey. Some day he must marry, but not yet. Another flutter: a girl runs laughing to catch her toy pom, showing her lithe, active limbs as she slips along. "There comes Sir Edward Castleknock," a little elderly man, his income lately depleted by a white marble tombstone to his second wife, but he has no heir; he must marry again, and he is a rich man. The youthful mothers signal to him, stopping him carelessly, calling to their girls as he stops. "Here's my little Evie, grown up, Sir Edward; you used to give her sugared almonds. Makes one so ancient, doesn't it?" Evie musters a smile for the memory of sugared almonds. She says something conventional with a show of excellent teeth. Sir Edward is musical. Milady invites him to hear the dear child sing; to lunch on Sunday--one-thirty--the old address. One mamma has got a start of her competitors; captured the widower as he emerges from the sombre draped doors of his mourning. "To sing?" Lady Evie wrinkles a pretty nose. "Well, Mumsie, don't let it get past 'Violets' and that French song; they are the only two dear old Monsieur could ever get me to sing in tune." They work hard, these mothers, for their daughters, for what is life without riches and places, and a niche in Society's walls? What waste of bringing up, of French and German governesses, of dancing lessons and swimming lessons, and dull classes, if Evie or Audrey merely married some ordinary youngster, to disappear with him upon a couple of thousand a year! So many competitors, so few prizes. The race is to the swift, and the strong, and the astute; to the matron who knows not only how to seize opportunity, but not to release it again until it puts a ring upon her daughter's massaged hand. So Evie and Sue and Audrey must stifle the natural folly which nature has placed in their fresh young hearts, and help "Mum" to the proud hour when her daughter will count her wedding presents by the hundred, and smile sweetly on the bevy of maidens who are still running in the race. Some, without kindly, clever mothers, must fight for themselves, and in the fight use strange methods to attain their prize. Crooked ways, cut-off corners, wrong side of posts; yet they too smile quite as contentedly if they win at the last.