"I don't get anything I want," she had cried back at her bitterly. "We can't even have a Long Island place. We can't go to Aiken. We can't go abroad for a summer. Even if we did go, it would be on the wrong steamer, and we'd sit at the wrong table and meet the wrong people. And I can't _drag_ Alfred to a Waldorf dance, and Horse Show week I've always had to sit up alone in a box like a bump on a log. And he insists on driving in the Park on Sundays--_Sundays_, mind you--and he always wants to go to Sherry's or Martin's for Saturday dinner, and wear a Tuxedo coat at a cotillon. Why we've even bought our house here on the wrong street, and to make it even worse we're on the wrong _side_ of the street. We go and sit through those everlasting operas on the wrong night. When we leave town it's always at the wrong season. Then we come back wrong--about the time other people are leaving. Is it any wonder I feel like giving up? Why, Cordelia, my dear, you've met more people and got to be better known in five months than I have in five years!" And she stirred her coffee with the vigor with which she had once dreamed to stir the social world. "And you can hold people and make them like you," she went on. "And you aren't afraid to show people that you care for them." It was Cordelia's turn to drive trouble from a softly rebellious breast. "If he only guessed how sweet and good you are, some wise man I know would surely come and run off with you." Mrs. Spaulding looked at her tragically and heaved a ponderous sigh. Then her American saving sense of humor came to her rescue and she clung to it, like the drowning to a raft. "I'm a sentimental old fool, my dear," was all she said. And Cordelia was left to her own troubled thoughts. More than once the author of The Silver Poppy had been heard to say that she was a greatly misjudged woman. The world accepted her as austere and impassive. The myriad readers of her book thought of her as clever but chilly, as talented but retiring. Yet "upon the stern and somber loom of passion and love," her publisher's announcement had read, "the girlish hand of this fair daughter of Dixie has wielded a shuttle wound with the odorous warmth of the Southland and dyed with the bright fancy of one who has loved and known and suffered. From the story of one woman's tenderest devotion and one man's deepest love this young hand has intuitively woven the magic woof of many-hued romance."