dar's women, an acclaimed beauty. Yet there were other qualities which set her aside from the commonplace round of marriageable girls. She was easily the most smartly dressed in all the room; there was about her clothes a breathless sort of perfection that bespoke the taste of an artist. In place of an overwhelming beauty, she had developed a wit that could be infinitely more disastrous. In this, she resembled Cleopatra, Madame de Staël and the Montespan. These things made her perilous and caused many an ambitious mother hours of sleeplessness.
A long nose, a generous mouth frankly painted, green eyes set a trifle too near each other, a mass of brick red hair and a marvelous figure . . . these things comprised the physical aspect of Sabine Cane, a combination that was changeable and a trifle bizarre and therefore, as Thérèse Callendar had observed more than once, enormously intrigante. But there was more than this, for in the green eyes there lay a light of humor and malice and beneath the brick red hair a brain which had a passion for the affairs of other people. What disconcerted her enemies most was her air of entering a room; she did not walk in, she made an entrance. It was as if such women as Mrs. Sigourney and Lorna Vale did not exist. Lily Langtry or Cléo de Merode were less effective. To-night she wore a brilliant yellow dress with a wide full train. It was as if she understood shrewdly her ugliness and made capital of it.
Sabine knew things about these people who filled the drawing room—little bits of gossip, scraps of information picked up here and there in the course of her twenty-six years. She knew, for example, that Mrs. Champion (mother of the virgins and most rarefied of aristocrats) had a grandmother known as Ruddy Mary who in her first assault upon the social ranks had invited people to a monstrous ball by invitations written in red ink, and so gained a sobriquet that was now forgotten. She knew that Wickham Chase had a maternal grandfather who had been a Jewish pawnbroker and laid up the money which he now spent. She knew that the Honorable Emma Hawksby (niece of the no-
