Social caution was personified to her in her memory of her mother--a slender, black-garbed lady, with parted grey hair, neatly waved along her brow, and a tortoiseshell lorgnette that she used to raise, mildly yet alarmingly, at foreign _tables d'hotes_, for an appraising survey of the company.

The memory of this lorgnette operated with Althea as a sort of social standard; it typified delicacy, dignity, deliberation, a scrupulous regard for the claims of heredity, and a scrupulous avoidance of uncertain or all too certain types.

Althea felt that she had carried on the tradition worthily.

The lorgnette would have passed all her more recent friends--those made with only its inspiration as a guide.

She was as careful as her mother as to whom she admitted to her acquaintanceship, eschewing in particular those of her compatriots whose accents or demeanour betrayed them to her trained discrimination as outside the radius of acceptance.