Her sunny drawing-room, with its gathered silk curtains, was especially beautiful; whatever the Leffingwells or Allisons may have lacked, it was not taste.  Honora sat in it and wondered:  wondered, as she looked back over the road she had threaded somewhat blindly towards the Ideal, whether she might not somewhere have taken the wrong turn.  The farther she travelled, the more she seemed to penetrate into a land of unrealities.  The exquisite objects by which she was surrounded, and which she had collected with such care, had no substance:  she would not have been greatly surprised, at any moment, to see them vanish like a scene in a theatre, leaning an empty, windy stage behind them.  They did not belong to her, nor she to them.

Past generations of another blood, no doubt, had been justified in looking upon the hazy landscapes in the great tapestries as their own:  and children’s children had knelt, in times gone by, beside the carved stone mantel.  The big, gilded chairs with the silken seats might appropriately have graced the table of the Hotel de Rambouillet.  Would not the warriors and the wits, the patient ladies of high degree and of many children, and even the ‘precieuses ridicules’ themselves, turn over in their graves if they could so much as imagine the contents of the single street in modern New York where Honora lived?

One morning, as she sat in that room, possessed by these whimsical though painful fancies, she picked up a newspaper and glanced through it, absently, until her eye fell by chance upon a name on the editorial page.  Something like an electric shock ran through her, and the letters of the name seemed to quiver and become red.  Slowly they spelled—­Peter Erwin.

“The argument of Mr. Peter Erwin, of St. Louis, before the Supreme Court of the United States in the now celebrated Snowden case is universally acknowledged by lawyers to have been masterly, and reminiscent of the great names of the profession in the past.  Mr. Erwin is not dramatic.  He appears to carry all before him by the sheer force of intellect, and by a kind of Lincolnian ability to expose a fallacy:  He is still a young man, self-made, and studied law under Judge Brice of St. Louis, once President of the National Bar Association, whose partner he is"....

Honora cut out the editorial and thrust it in her gown, and threw the newspaper is the fire.  She stood for a time after it had burned, watching the twisted remnants fade from flame colour to rose, and finally blacken.  Then she went slowly up the stairs and put on her hat and coat and veil.  Although a cloudless day, it was windy in the park, and cold, the ruffled waters an intense blue.  She walked fast.

She lunched with Mrs. Holt, who had but just come to town; and the light, like a speeding guest, was departing from the city when she reached her own door.

“There is a gentleman in the drawing-room, madam,” said the butler.  “He said he was an old friend, and a stranger in New York, and asked if he might wait.”