At the end of a long week of tormenting uncertainty, in sheer despair she flung herself into the currents of activity that rose about her, like a hundred inviting Lethes, with the first success of The Unwise Virgins. For the triumph of that volume did not long remain a matter of doubt. Gaily designed posters, clustering flamboyantly about bill-boards and blind-walls, about street-cars and elevated-railway platforms, about even urban and suburban ash-barrels, told of its merits and its unprecedented sales. More than one of the larger department stores gave the volume a table by itself, above which hung a huge photographic print of the authoress, showing the frailest of white shoulders emerging from a swathing cloud of lace-work, and above them a face with femininely appealing eyes and the pensive shadow of a half-bitter and yet half-girlish smile. An English edition was soon called for, and was more than moderately successful, while even The Silver Poppy itself appeared in a new binding, to reappear still again as a newspaper serial, and to bring yet a little more publicity to the young authoress, in the very heyday of a fame for which it was commonly said she was at heart most contemptuous. Yet Cordelia flung herself into it all as into a cooling stream, drugging herself during the following month or two with an incessant, opiate rush of activity that, spread thinly, might easily have irrigated a less tumultuous lifetime. The newspapers were full of her doings; one day she was winning the prize in a world's beauty competition; another day she was to go on the stage and star in a dramatized version of her new book; and at still another time she was to return to the South and devote the rest of her life to a cycle of novels dealing comprehensively with American national life. Hanchett was commissioned to paint a portrait of her for the Southern Women's Club; and, while she remained a guest in the little, yellow-tinted study on Seventy-second Street, there was never a day when either the yellow Victoria or the more massive brougham of the Spauldings was not in use. But she had grown strangely averse to many of her former friends, and Mrs. Spaulding soon realized that the older feeling no longer held them together, though, indeed, it was not until after the first announcements of Cordelia's proposed lecturing tour that the yellow-tinted study was actually deserted by her. When the author of The Unwise Virgins did migrate, she sought apartments in one of the handsomest of those lower Fifth Avenue private hotels, consecrated, in the words of Miss Short, "to white-gloved attendants, lap-dogs, and opulent valetudinarianism." Cordelia felt that there must be no shadow of excuse for her enemies--and how many of them she had!--to claim that the social tide had turned against her. The cost of these apartments frightened her a little at first; but until they had been well photographed and the views