But her efforts had been futile, and to say that Mrs.De Peyster had not succeeded was to admit that poor Olivetta Harmon was indeed a failure.

She had lacked the fortune to attract the conservative investor who is looking for a sound business proposition in her he promises to support; she had lacked the good looks to lure on the lover who throws himself romantically away upon a penniless pretty face; and she had not been clever enough to attract the man so irrationally bold as to set sail upon the sea of matrimony with a woman of brains.

And so, her brief summer at an end, she had receded to those remote and undiscovered shores on which dwell the poor relations of the Four Hundred; whereon she had lived respectably, as a lady (for that she should ever appear a lady was due the position of Mrs.De Peyster), upon an almost microscopic income; and from which bleak and distant land of second-cousindom she came in glad and proud obedience to fill an occasional vacant place at one of Mrs.De Peyster's second-best dinner parties.
She had arrived but the moment before to bid her exalted cousin adieu and wish her _bon-voyage_, and was now silently gazing in unenvious admiration at the jewels Mrs.De Peyster was transferring to their traveling-cases--with never a guess that perturbation might exist beneath her kinswoman's composed exterior.

As a matter of fact, under the trying circumstances which confronted Mrs.De Peyster, any other household would have been in confusion, any lesser woman might have been headed toward hysteria.

But centuries of having had its own will had established the De Peyster habit of believing that things would eventuate according to the De Peyster wish; it was not in the De Peyster blood to give way.