Cordelia Vaughan was indeed a very much talked about young lady, and it was just at this juncture that Mrs. Alfred Spaulding had swooped down on her and triumphantly carried her off, very much like a plump hen-hawk making away with a homeless duckling. She was still delightfully childlike and ingenuous for one already so great. The poor girl, Mrs. Spaulding held, needed a mother's care. She was giving up too much to her work. She must have more amusement, more diversion. She should have a little den of her own, and she should work when she wanted to, and play when she wanted to. She should be as free as though she were in her own home. It was, too, in no way mildly hinted that under the roof of such a patroness she would have unrivaled opportunities for studying the foibles and weaknesses of New York's most exclusive circles. In fact, Mrs. Spaulding would give a series of receptions and teas and things for her, for she had always wanted to see more of those dear, untidy Bohemians with the long hair. Though the young authoress from the South had been a willing enough captive, under what roof, indeed, did the eagle wings of genius ever unfurl with ease? Cordelia, however, had hungered for a little of the fulness of life. Her earlier New York existence, bright and attractive as it had seemed to the outer eye, had been an unutterably lonely and hollow one. Life in a Washington Square boarding-house had proved no better than a more irregular existence in a dilapidated old studio on lower Fifth Avenue, where for several months she invariably burned her own toast and regularly boiled her own tea, and where her callers were equally divided between overinquisitive reporters and impoverished authors looking for assistance. So Mrs. Spaulding felt that she had taken a new grip on life when her timorous little _protégée_ was installed in the yellow-tinted study which had been made ready for her. It was an eminence by proxy, but it was better than nonentity; and in her silent gratitude she saw to it that Cordelia wanted for nothing, and, on the whole, was not unhappy.