He found his cousin so tractable on the journey out that he began to have hopes of persuading Steven to the collar and wash-basin, with Doctor Vardaman's help. "I'd rather Mrs. Pallinder saw him looking clean, anyhow--she's so dainty herself," thought Gwynne, with a burning change of colour. Alas! No such good luck! As they neared the Swiss cottage, they beheld the lady tripping out from the door, exquisitely trim and gracious, smiling and showing all her pretty white teeth, with Doctor Vardaman escorting her to his gate, in his pleasantly formal old way. Mrs. Pallinder dimpled, and flashed her clear grey eyes under their amazingly black lashes and brows at Gwynne; she was en-haloed in rich furs and soft scrolls of ostrich-plumes; she rustled and fluttered with an enticing suggestion of dainty womanliness, and there was something even in the frail absurdity of her little, thin, high-heeled and pointed-toed boots that appealed to the masculine sense almost touchingly. Old Steven Gwynne himself felt this jewelry-box charm; he looked at her with open, child-like, rather frightened admiration. Wealth and luxury for which in the abstract he had--or believed himself in all sincerity to have--so vigorous a disdain, exhibited thus concretely, stunned the old man; Mrs. Pallinder, to the ordinary view merely an unusually handsome and well-dressed woman, somehow represented to Steven that material power, confident, lucky, successful, to which he had long ago bowed down in the person of Governor Gwynne; and, if it had not been for the uplifting consciousness of being that great man's cousin, Steven would have shuffled and stammered before her like any school-boy.