Tommy, calling for Clementina the next morning; was confronted at the open door, not by Eliza, but by a demure damsel in a black frock, black apron, and a black bow in her hair, who said “Oui, monsieur,” when addressed. Tommy, still bewildered, asked whether she was a new lady’s maid. “Oui; monsieur,” said the damsel, and showed him into the Sheraton drawing-room. He sat down meekly and waited for Clementina. She came down soon, a resplendent vision, exquisitely gowned, perfectly hatted, delicately gloved, and in her hand she jingled a small goldsmith’s shop. She pirouetted round. “Like it?” Tommy groaned. “Clementina, darling, tell me, in Heaven’s name, what you’re playing at, or I’ll go raving mad.” “I told you that one of these days I was going to become a lady. The day has come. Don’t I look like a lady?” “That’s the devil of it,” he laughed. “You look like an archduchess.” They picked up Etta and met Quixtus at the Carlton where they lunched in the middle of the great gay room. The young people’s curious awe of the transmogrified Clementina soon melted away. The big, warm-hearted Clementina they loved was unchanged; but to her was added a laughter-evoking, brilliant, joyous personage whose existence they had never suspected. Quixtus went home stimulated and uplifted. He had never enjoyed two hours so much in his life. And that was the beginning of the glory of Clementina Wing. Day by day the glory deepened. The pyrotechnic—a flash, a bedazzlement and then darkness—was not in Clementina’s nature. She had deliberately immolated the phœnix of dusky plumage and from its ashes had arisen this second and radiant phœnix incarnation. She suffered, as she confessed to herself, infernally; for a new fire-born phœnix must have its skin peculiarly tender; but she grinned and bore it for the greater glory—well, not of Clementina alone—but of God and her sex and the happiness of those she loved and the things that stood for the right. She was fighting the interloping woman with her own weapons. She, Clementina, the despised and rejected of men, was pitting her sex’s fascinations against the professional seductress. She had won the first pitched battle. She had swept the enemy from the field. Sheer fierceness of love, almost animal, for the child, sheer pity flaming white for the man grown dear to her, sheer sex, sheer womanhood—these were the forces at work. It would have been easy to denounce the woman to Quixtus. But that might have thrown him back into darkness. Easy, too, to have held her knowledge as a threat over the woman’s head and bade her begone. But where had been the triumph? Where the glory? Whereas to scorn the use of her knowledge and conquer otherwise, therein lay matter for thrilling exultation. It was an achievement worth the struggle.