He liked to watch her moving among her guests in the dignified, gracious way that was habitual to her.
"She is the very personification of an old-fashioned English gentlewoman," he said once to Cedric; "but she is hardly modern enough in her ideas.

She takes things too seriously, and that bores people." It must be confessed that to her young acquaintances Mrs.Herrick was rather awe-inspiring.

Mere pleasure-seekers--drones in the human hive and all such ne'er-do-weels--were careful to give her a wide berth.

Her quiet little speeches sometimes had a sting in them.

"She takes the starch out of a fellow, don't you know," observed one of these fashionable loafers, a young officer in the Hussars--"makes him think he's a worm and no man, and that sort of thing; but she doesn't understand us Johnnies." Perhaps Mrs.Herrick would willingly have recalled her crushing speech when, years after, she read the account of Charlie Gordon's death.