CHAPTER XI.
It was so warm and charming an April day that Mrs.Cricklander and some of her friends were out of doors before luncheon, walking up and down the broad terrace walk that flanked Wendover's southern side.
It was a Georgian house, spacious and comfortable, but not especially beautiful.

Mrs.Cricklander was a woman of enormous ability--she had a perfect talent for discovering just the right people to work for her pleasure and benefit, while being without a single inspiration herself.
If she engaged a professional adviser to furnish her house, and decorate it, you could be sure he was of the best and that his services had been measured and balanced beforehand, and that he had been generously paid whatever he had obtained by bargaining for it, and that the agreement was signed and every penny of the cost entered in a little book.

It was so with everything that touched her life.

She had a definite idea of what she wanted, although she did not always want the same thing for long; but while she did, she went about getting it in a sensible, practical way, secured it, paid for it,--and then often threw it away.
She had felt she wanted Vincent Cricklander because he belonged to one of the old families in New York and played polo well, and, being a great heiress though of no pretensions to birth, she wished to have an undisputed entry into the inner circle of her own country.

He fulfilled her requirements for quite three years, and then she felt she was "through" with America, and wanted fresh fields for her efforts.