A new and wistful feeling of loneliness was upon her.  For some days, with a certain sense of isolation and a tinge of envy which she would not acknowledge, she had been watching a group of well-dressed, clean-looking people galloping off on horseback or filling the six-seated buckboards.  They were from New York—­that she had discovered; and they did not mix with the others in the hotel.  She had thought it strange that Howard did not know them, but for a reason which she did not analyze she hesitated to ask him who they were.  They had rather a rude manner of staring —­especially the men—­and the air of deriving infinite amusement from that which went on about them.  One of them, a young man with a lisp who was addressed by the singular name of “Toots,” she had overheard demanding as she passed:  who the deuce was the tall girl with the dark hair and the colour?  Wherever she went, she was aware of them.  It was foolish, she knew, but their presence seemed—­in the magnitude which trifles are wont to assume in the night-watches—­of late to have poisoned her pleasure.

Enlightenment as to the identity of these disturbing persons came, the next day, from an unexpected source.  Indeed, from Mrs. Tyler.  She loved brides, she said, and Honora seemed to her such a sweet bride.  It was Mrs. Tyler’s ambition to become thin (which was hitching her wagon to a star with a vengeance), and she invited our heroine to share her constitutional on the porch.  Honora found the proceeding in the nature of an ordeal, for Mrs. Tyler’s legs were short, her frizzled hair very blond, and the fact that it was natural made it seem, somehow, all the more damning.

They had scarcely begun to walk before Honora, with a sense of dismay of which she was ashamed, beheld some of the people who had occupied her thoughts come out of the door and form a laughing group at the end of the porch.  She could not rid herself of the feeling that they were laughing at her.  She tried in vain to drive them from her mind, to listen to Mrs. Tyler’s account of how she, too, came as a bride to New York from some place with a classical name, and to the advice that accompanied the narration.  The most conspicuous young woman in the group, in riding clothes, was seated on the railing, with the toe of one boot on the ground.  Her profile was clear-cut and her chestnut hair tightly knotted behind under her hat.  Every time they turned, this young woman stared at Honora amusedly.

“Nasty thing!” exclaimed Mrs. Tyler, suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of a description of the delights of life in the metropolis.

“Who?” asked Honora.

“That young Mrs. Freddy Maitland, sitting on the rail.  She’s the rudest woman in New York.”

A perversity of spirit which she could not control prompted Honora to reply: 

“Why, I think she is so good-looking, Mrs. Tyler.  And she seems to have so much individuality and independence.”