Mrs. Grainger was very tall.  And Sargent, in his portrait of her, had caught with admirable art the indefinable, yet partly supercilious and scornful smile with which she looked down upon the world about her.  She possessed the rare gift of combining conventionality with personal distinction in her dress.  Her hair was almost Titian red in colour, and her face (on the authority of Mr. Reginald Farwell) was at once modern and Italian Renaissance.  Not the languid, amorous Renaissance, but the lady of decision who chose, and did not wait to be chosen.  Her eyes had all the colours of the tapaz, and her regard was so baffling as to arouse intense antagonism in those who were not her friends.

To Honora, groping about for a better and a higher life, the path of philanthropy had more than once suggested itself.  And on the day of Peter’s visit to New York, when she had lunched with Mrs. Holt, she had signified her willingness (now that she had come to live in town) to join the Working Girls’ Relief Society.  Mrs. Holt, needless to say, was overjoyed:  they were to have a meeting at her house in the near future which Honora must not fail to attend.  It was not, however, without a feeling of trepidation natural to a stranger that she made her way to that meeting when the afternoon arrived.

No sooner was she seated in Mrs. Holt’s drawing-room—­filled with camp-chairs for the occasion—­than she found herself listening breathlessly to a recital of personal experiences by a young woman who worked in a bindery on the East side.  Honora’s heart was soft:  her sympathies, as we know, easily aroused.  And after the young woman had told with great simplicity and earnestness of the struggle to support herself and lead an honest and self-respecting existence, it seemed to Honora that at last she had opened the book of life at the proper page.

Afterwards there were questions, and a report by Miss Harber, a middle-aged lady with glasses who was the secretary.  Honora looked around her.  The membership of the Society, judging by those present, was surely of a sufficiently heterogeneous character to satisfy even the catholic tastes of her hostess.  There were elderly ladies, some benevolent and some formidable, some bedecked and others unadorned; there were earnest-looking younger women, to whom dress was evidently a secondary consideration; and there was a sprinkling of others, perfectly gowned, several of whom were gathered in an opposite corner.  Honora’s eyes, as the reading of the report progressed, were drawn by a continual and resistless attraction to this group; or rather to the face of one of the women in it, which seemed to stare out at her like the eat in the tree of an old-fashioned picture puzzle, or the lineaments of George Washington among a mass of boulders on a cliff.  Once one has discovered it, one can see nothing else.  In vain Honora dropped her eyes; some strange fascination compelled her to raise them again until they met those of the other woman:  Did their glances meet?  She could never quite be sure, so disconcerting were the lights in that regard—­lights, seemingly, of laughter and mockery.