Mr. Donald Estey thought that he knew women well. It pleased his fancy to think that he had his feminine friends nicely pigeonholed and labeled, and that he had but to pass an hour or two of intimate talk with any woman to be able at once to ticket her accurately. His first hour of intimate talk with Mrs. Darling, however, left him confused and baffled--but mightily interested: in the course of that one hour he had shelved her in almost every one of his pigeonholes, only to find at the end of it that she was still free and uncatalogued. She was a flirt; she was not a flirt. She was sincere; she was hypocritical. She was brilliantly subtle; she was incredibly stupid. She was charming; she was commonplace. She was as clear as crystal; she was as inscrutable as a sphinx--and she was all these things in that one short first hour. At the end of it, Mr. Donald Estey, with a long breath and a frown, but with a quickened pulse, decided that he would have another hour with her as soon as possible. He had no difficulty in obtaining it. Mrs. Darling, indeed, seemed quite as desirous of his society as he was of hers; yet there was still the elusive something in her manner that robbed it of all offensive eagerness. Again to-day, after the hour's intimate talk, Estey found himself confused and baffled, with the lady still outside his pigeonholes. Nor did he find the situation changed the next day, or the next. Then suddenly he awoke to a new element in the case--the extraordinary deference that was being paid his lightest wish or preference on the part of Mrs. Darling. At first, doubting the accuracy of his suspicions, he systematically put her to the test, choosing purposely the most obvious and unmistakable. Blue was his favorite color, he said: she appeared in blue the next day. Browning was his best-loved poet, he declared: in less than an hour he found her poring over "Pippa Passes" in the library. A woman who could talk, and talk well, on current events won his sincere admiration every time, he told her: he wondered the next morning how late she must have sat up the night before, studying the merits and demerits of the four presidential candidates.