Copyright, 1891, BY ELLEN OLNEY KIRK. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. ., U.S. A. ghton & Co. THERE was just that touch o Mrs. Lee Childe's sudden res York society which impresse During the four years of her wi asked, "Is Milly never coming with her father-in-law?" Then when she was ready to shape o herself, and all the world was This afternoon in November sh since three o'clock receiving t who had promptly answered he and although it was now past had left the house. Each see to remain within sight or hea and an inch of standing-room "tested to new-comers. A con stances had made Mrs. Lee tional, and not a few were 1 that she herself was exception composed chiefly of women, an listened, studying her wit and beauty as a veteran general studies his enemy's strength and position. There were charming old ladies, who, having fought their own battles more or less successfully, might now with magnanimity assist at a younger woman's triumph. There were matrons, with daughters of their own who would find a rival in the youthful widow. There were experienced society girls, who coveted this easy vantageground held by a woman hardly beyond their own age. Then there were the débutantes who gazed with open-eyed amazement at the phenomenon of a woman so consummately adult as to have been married and to have lost her husband, yet who not only assumed the advantages of youth, but towards whom every eligible man in the room was pressing with a definiteness of intention which might easily have tankled in the breasts of these charming young creatures, to who the good things of the opening season rightfully belonged. "Evidently the chaperons were saying to each other, "Milly Chide has refused to grow old." "She is beautiful, magnificent, enchanting," said Paul Sécor. "I have always observed that widowhood gives a fresh lease of youth and beauty. Besides, I suppose she takes the family 'elixir regularly." This was an old joke, but some witticisms enjoy perennial freshness. To know what and whom to laugh at, as well as when to do so, is the surest test of knowledge of the world. For in society, from reasons of state, so much that is actually dull and absurd has to be taken with profound seriousness, so much pettiness must be accepted as immeasurable bigness, so many balloons to which a pin prick of ridicule would be fatal require to be inflated by the bated breath of reverence, that we need even to smile warily. But it had always been admissible to laugh at "Dr. Pardee's Elixir of Life," which was the source of Milly Childe's wealth. Nine years before, when Lee Childe, the most exclusive, the most fastidious of men, had married Emily Briggs, co-heiress with her uncle to one of the most successful patent medicines of the last half century, society had exclaimed much after the fashion of Mme. de Sévigné over a famous mésalliance of her epoch; not however but that all the world was ready to applaud, Mrs. Rutherford Childe's cleverness in securing the Pardee millions for her son. Everybody rushed to see the bride who, already fabulously rich in dower, would all the time go on receiving nobody knows how many thousands of yearly income from the elixir, which still bubbled perennially from its original spring, rejuvenating the human race. Mrs. Lee Childe, née Emily Briggs, proved to be a girl of eighteen, so youthful in face, figure, and manner as to seem two years younger. She wore the gowns of her splendid trousseau with an air of being oppressed by their weight. She was slight to fragility, pale, with great frightened eyes |