Vera now was twenty-one, tall, wonderfully graceful, and of the most enchanting loveliness. Her education had been cosmopolitan. In the largest cities of America she had met persons of every class--young women, old women, mothers with married sons and daughters; women of society as it is exploited in the Sunday supplements; school girls, shop girls, factory girls--all had told her their troubles; and men of every condition had come to scoff and had remained to express, more or less offensively, their admiration. Some of the younger of these, after a first visit, returned the day following, and each begged the beautiful priestess of the occult to fly with him, to live with him, to marry him. When this happened Vera would touch a button, and “Mannie” Day, who admitted visitors, and later, in the hall, searched their hats and umbrellas for initials, came on the run and threw the infatuated one out upon a cold and unfeeling sidewalk. So Vera had seen both the seamy side of life and, in the drawing rooms where Vance and she exhibited their mind reading tricks, had been made much of by great ladies and, for an hour as brief as Cinderella’s, had looked upon a world of kind and well-bred people. Since she was fourteen, for seven years, this had been her life--a life as open to the public as the life of an actress, as easy of access as that of the stenographer in the hotel lobby. As a result, the girl had encased herself in a defensive armor of hardness and distrust, a protection which was rendered futile by the loveliness of her face, by the softness of her voice, by the deep, brooding eyes, and the fine forehead on which, like a crown, rested the black waves of her hair. In her work Vera accepted, without question, the parts to which Vance assigned her. When in their mummeries they were successful, she neither enjoyed the credulity of those they had tricked nor was sobered with remorse. In the world Vance found a certain number of people with money who demanded to be fooled. It was his business and hers to meet that demand. If ever the conscience of either stirred restlessly, Vance soothed it by the easy answer that if they did not take the money some one else would. It was all in the day’s work. It was her profession. As she entered the library of Mr. Hallowell, which, with Vance, she already had visited several times, she looked like a child masquerading in her mother’s finery. She suggested an ingenue who had been suddenly sent on in the role of the Russian adventuress. Her slight girl’s figure was draped in black lace. Her face was shaded by a large picture hat, heavy with drooping ostrich feathers; around her shoulders was a necklace of jade, and on her wrists many bracelets of silver gilt. When she moved they rattled. As the girl advanced, smiling, to greet Mr. Hallowell, she suddenly stopped, shivered slightly, and threw her right arm across her eyes. Her left arm she stretched over the table.