"Nice girl, this Cecilia. You know the Hollisters,--oodles of money in the family. The chevalier's father scored big in baby-buggies--responsible for the modern sleep-inducing perambulators; sold out to a trust. The father of Wiggins's inamorata had started in to be a marine painter. A founder of this club, come to think of it, but dropped out long ago. You have heard of him--Bassford Hollister. Funny thing his having to give up art. Great gifts for the marine, but never could overcome tendency to seasickness. Honest! Every time he painted a wave it upset him horribly. The doctors could n't help him. Next tried his hand at the big gulches down-town. There was a chance there to hit off the metropolitan sky-line and become immortal by doing it first; but a new trouble developed. Doing the high buildings made him dizzy! Honest! He was good, too, and would have made a place, but he had to cut it out. He was so torn up over his two failures that he blew in his share of the perambulator money in riotous living. Lost his wife into the bargain, and has settled down to a peaceful life up in Westchester County in one of these cute little bungalows the real-estate operators build for you if you pay a dollar down for a picture of an acre lot." "And the daughter?" "Well, Bassford Hollister has two daughters. It's the older one that has stolen Wiggins's heart away. She's Cecilia, you know. Very literary and that sort of thing, and pushed tea and cookies at the Asolando when that idiocy was opened. Wiggins saw her there last spring. Miss Hollister, the aunt,--whom I 'm fond of calling the chevalier,--picked up her nieces about that time and hauled them off to Europe, and Wiggins scampered after them. I don't know what they did to Wiggy, but you see how he acts. I rather imagine that the chevalier did n't smile on his suit. She's a holy terror, that woman, with an international reputation for doing weird and most unaccountable things. She draws a sort of royalty on all the baby-buggies in creation; it amounts to a birth-tax, in contravention of the free guarantees of the Constitution. The people will rise against it some day. "She's plausible enough, but she's the past mistress of ulterior motive. She got Fortner, the mural painter, up to a place she used to have at Newport a few years ago, ostensibly to do a frieze or something, and she made him teach her to fire a gun. You know Fortner, with his artistic ideals! And he did n't know any more about guns than a flea. It was droll, decidedly droll. But she kept him there a month,--wouldn't let him off the reservation; but she paid him his fee just the same, though he never painted a stroke. When he got back to town, he was a wreck. It was just like being in jail. I warn you to let her alone. If you should undertake to fix her flues she's likely to put you to work digging potatoes. She's no end of a case."