Then, catching a glimpse of another figure, she exclaimed, "Oh, there comes Miss Huntress!" and immediately settled herself with an air of elegant leisure to receive her former superior. Miss Huntress was a source of continual satisfaction to Lena, the opposite of a skeleton at the feast, a continual reminder of present prosperity as compared with past nonentity. To meet her gave Madame Cecropia the same thrill of satisfaction that it still did to draw her dainty skirts around her and step into her carriage, half hoping that some envious girl was viewing her perfections as she had once eyed those of others. On the other hand, Miss Huntress derived almost equal pleasure out of her acquaintance with Lena, whose littleness she measured, and whose small successes she looked upon with amusement, unflecked by envy. Emily Huntress was a plodding person, with much business on hand and an earnest necessity for earning money, and though her canons were not over fine, still she had her standards and lived up to them. She found Lena useful as a source of social information.
"You want to know what is going on?" inquired Mrs. Percival. "Well, of course you know it's Lent, and there isn't anything much. But if you will come up to my boudoir, I will look over my engagement book, and perhaps I can help you to a paragraph or two."
The word boudoir was a sweetmeat to Lena's palate, combined, as it was, with the knowledge that her visitor, with a sister, kept house in three rooms.
So they went up stairs, and Lena babbled and preened herself, while Miss Huntress frowned and pondered on the difficulties of making anything readable out of her small kernel of information. The arrival of a cup of tea, Miss Huntress, being a woman as well as a reporter, found mollifying to the hardness of life.
"I see," she said with an acid little laugh, "you have the _Chatterer_ up here in your unholy of unholies." Her eyes fell on a small magazine which made a speciality of besmirching the good names of the entire country. "Everybody reads it, and everybody pretends to despise it."
"It's awfully interesting," said Lena, and she went on with a little giggle, "I think I'll just tuck it away before my husband comes in. He doesn't approve of it, you know. Men don't care for gossip. I think it is perfectly wonderful what an amount of scandal it gets hold of. I don't see how they do it. And they've such a naughty way of writing it up, too."