So her appetite for kindness, even the newspaper variety, was keen and not at all discriminating; and the reaction from two years' solitude--two years of endurance, of shrinking from public comment--had developed in her a fierce longing for pleasure and for play-fellows. Her fellow-men had responded with an enthusiasm which still surprised her delightfully at moments. * * * * * The clever Swedish maid now removed the four-legged tray from her knees; Strelsa, propped on her pillows, was still intent on her newspapers, satisfying a natural curiosity concerning what the world thought about her costume of the night before, her beauty, herself, and the people she knew. At last, agreeably satiated, she lowered the newspaper and lay back, dreamy-eyed, faintly smiling, lost in pleasant retrospection. Had she really appeared as charming last night as these exceedingly kind New York newspapers pretended? Did this jolly world really consider her so beautiful? She wished to believe it. She tried to. Perhaps it was really true--because all these daily paragraphs, which had begun with her advent into certain New York sets, must really have been founded on something unusual about her. And it could not be her fortune which continued to inspire such journalistic loyalty and devotion, because she had none--scarcely enough money in fact to manage with, dress with, pay her servants, and maintain her pretty little house in the East Eighties. It could not be her wit; she had no more than the average American girl. Nor was there anything else in her--neither her cultivation, attainments, nor talents--to entitle her to distinction. So apparently it must be her beauty that evoked paragraphs which had already made her a fashion in the metropolis--was making her a cult--even perhaps a notoriety. [Illustration: "Strelsa, propped on her pillows, was still intent on her newspapers."] Because those people who had personally known Reginald Leeds, were exceedingly curious concerning this young girl who had been a nobody, as far as New York was concerned, until her name became legally coupled with the name of one of the richest and most dissipated scions of an old and honourable New York family. The public which had read with characteristic eagerness all about the miserable finish of Reginald Leeds, found its abominable curiosity piqued by his youthful widow's appearance in town.