marked by that, too, he thought. In a whole shipload of tailors' woollen "sport clothes," here was a Parisian afternoon gown of bronze green and black and silver, silk and metal and a little lace, worn by one who quietly knew herself to be above both the ordinary conception of maritime utilities and the advice of fashion journals. Her independenc went so far as to treat the smoking-room to a kind of intimacy; no hat covered fhe polished pale bronze hair; beyond question this was a woman who would need to know a better reason for doing anything than that other women did it.
Never, Ogle felt, had he known that badgered word "elegance" so vividly expressed to a glance of the eye; though he took more than a glance. She had no definite age; she might have been a marvellous forty or twenty-five; but the latter would have been precocious, the pleased and impressed young dramatist concluded. For no one under thirty could be so completely what he thought the picture of the perfect woman of the world; and, deciding that she must surely be French, he found it appropriate to describe her to himself in her own tongue. In spite of the difficulty lately attending his steward's attempt to communicate with him in that language, he some-
