According to the Social Register, however, Mrs. Larpent lived in East Fifty-sixth Street and was the widow of Captain Claude Elcho Larpent of the 21st Lancers, a nephew of Field Marshal Viscount Risborough. That was all. If this precious volume, which is the vade-mecum of so many people who murmur the word society with a hiss that can be heard from one end of the town to the other, had attempted to do justice to the beautiful Ida, at least one-half of the volume would have been devoted to the story of her antecedents and career. Born at Paterson, New Jersey, the only daughter of a pushing and energetic little chemist named McKenna, who had married in a moment of the wildest kind of romance a little, slight, white-faced Russian girl who had left her country among a batch of unsavory emigrants and found employment in a button factory, Ida,--who can tell why?--was marked out from her tiniest years for the oldest profession in the world. One would have thought, to look at her parents,--the father a pugnacious, industrious, thrifty, red-headed Scotch-American, the mother a wistful, grateful, self-effacing little woman who, if there were any justice in this world, would several times have received the distinguished service order for her many acts of unnoticed heroism,--she would have been a bright, brave, practical and perhaps even pretty little girl. Instead of which, to everyone's astonishment and to the utter confusion of the chemist and his wife, Ida resembled nothing so much as a child of the aristocracy. She was thoroughbred from head to foot, perfectly made, with a small oval face and large wide-apart eyes, tiny wrists and ankles and black hair as fine as silk. The paradox of her having been born in the small common-place quarters above a second-rate store, amidst all the untidiness of a place in which the mother did her own housework, was not lost on the parents. They were proud of this fairy-like baby, but they were also frightened of her. They realized that she was in the nature of a freak. It seemed to them that she had come by accident; that, as a matter of fact, they had no right to her. They almost persuaded themselves into the belief, as the child grew up, that she was a changeling; that an unseen hand must have stolen their own sturdy, freckled and rampagious infant, and for some unaccountable reason slipped this exquisite little thing into her place.