who is half your age”—­I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman—­“is no better.  You are both of you getting into a rut.  What you want is some young blood pumped into your shrivelled veins.  I am going to hunt up every girl I know and all the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over, and then I’ll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North with her father to live, and who doesn’t know a soul, and nobody over twenty-five is to be admitted.  So if you and the Major want to come to Ruth’s tea—­Ruth’s, remember; not yours or the Major’s, or mine—­you will either have to pass the cake or take the gentlemen’s hats.  Do you hear?”

We heard, and we heard her laugh as she spoke, raising her gold lorgnon to her eyes and gazing at us with that half-quizzical look which so often comes over her face.

She was older than Peter—­must have been:  I never knew exactly.  It would not have been wise to ask her, and nobody else knew but Peter, and he never told.  And yet there was no mark of real old age upon her.  She and Peter were alike in this.  Her hair, worn Pompadour, was gray—­an honest black-and-white gray; her eyes were bright as needle points; the skin slightly wrinkled, but fresh and rosy—­a spare, straight, well-groomed old lady of—­perhaps sixty —­perhaps sixty-five, depending on her dress, or undress, for her shoulders were still full and well rounded.  “The most beautiful neck and throat, sir, in all Washington in her day,” old General Waterbury once told me, and the General was an authority.  “You should have seen her in her prime, sir.  What the devil the men were thinking of I don’t know, but they let her go back to Geneseo, and there she has lived ever since.  Why, sir, at a ball at the German Embassy she made such a sensation that—­” but then the General always tells such stories of most of the women he knows.

There was but little left of that kind of beauty.  She had kept her figure, it is true—­a graceful, easy moving figure, with the waist of a girl; well-proportioned arms and small, dainty hands.  She had kept, too, her charm of manner and keen sense of humor—­she wouldn’t have been Peter’s sister otherwise—­as well as her interest in her friend’s affairs, especially the love affairs of all the young people about her.

Her knowledge of men and women had broadened.  She read them more easily now than when she was a girl—­had suffered, perhaps, by trusting them too much.  This had sharpened the tip end of her tongue to so fine a point that when it became active—­and once in a while it did—­it could rip a sham reputation up the back as easily as a keen blade loosens the seams of a bodice.

Peter fell in at once with her plan for a “Rosebud Tea,” in spite of her raillery and the threatened possibility of our exclusion, promising not only to assist her with the invitations, but to be more than careful at the Bank in avoiding serious mistakes in his balances—­so as to be on hand promptly at four.  Moreover, if Jack had a sweetheart—­and there was no question of it, or ought not to be—­and Corinne had another, what would be better than bringing them all down together, so that Miss Felicia could look them over, and Miss Ruth and the Major could get better acquainted, especially Jack and Miss Felicia; and more especially Jack and himself.