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                           _LITTLE NOVELS BY_
                          _FAVOURITE AUTHORS_

                            Mrs. Pendleton’s
                                   Four-in-hand

                           GERTRUDE ATHERTON




[Illustration: Gertrude Atherton]




[Illustration]




                            Mrs. Pendleton’s
                                   Four-in-hand

                                   BY
                           GERTRUDE ATHERTON

                    AUTHOR OF “THE CONQUEROR,” ETC.

                                New York
                         THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
                     LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
                                  1903

                         _All rights reserved_




[Illustration]

                            COPYRIGHT, 1902,
                       BY MRS. GERTRUDE ATHERTON.

                            COPYRIGHT, 1903,
                       BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

                 *        *        *        *        *

            Set up, electrotyped, and published June, 1903.

                             Norwood Press
                J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
                         Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




                             ILLUSTRATIONS

     Portrait of Gertrude Atherton               _Frontispiece_

                                                  FACING PAGE

     “‘I have been insulted’”                          11

     “‘Well, why don’t you go?’”                       87




[Illustration]

                            MRS. PENDLETON’S
                              FOUR-IN-HAND




                                   I


Jessica, her hands clenched and teeth set, stood looking with hard
eyes at a small heap of letters lying on the floor. The sun, blazing
through the open window, made her blink unconsciously, and the ocean’s
deep voice rising to the Newport sands seemed to reiterate:—

“Contempt! Contempt!”

Tall, finely pointed with the indescribable air and style of the New
York woman, she did not suggest intimate knowledge of the word the ocean
hurled to her. In that moss-green room, with her haughty face and clean
skin, her severe faultless gown, she rather suggested the type to whom
poets a century hence would indite their sonnets—when she and her kind
had been set in the frame of the past. And if her dress was
conventional, she had let imagination play with her hair. The clear
evasive colour of flame, it was brushed down to her neck, parted,
crossed, and brought tightly up each side of her head just behind her
ears. Meeting above her bang, the curling ends allowed to fly loose, it
vaguely resembled Medusa’s wreath. Her eyes were grey, the colour of
mid-ocean, calm, beneath a grey sky. Not twenty-four, she had the repose
and “air” of one whose cradle had been rocked by Society’s foot; and
although at this moment her pride was in the dust, there was more anger
than shame in her face.

The door opened and her hostess entered. As Mrs. Pendleton turned slowly
and looked at her, Miss Decker gave a little cry.

[Illustration: “‘I HAVE BEEN INSULTED.’”]

“Jessica!” she said, “what is the matter?”

“I have been insulted,” said Mrs. Pendleton, deliberately. She felt a
savage pleasure in further humiliating herself.

“Insulted! You!” Miss Decker’s correct voice and calm brown eyes could
not have expressed more surprise and horror if a foreign diplomatist had
snapped his fingers in the face of the President’s wife. Even her sleek
brown hair almost quivered.

“Yes,” Mrs. Pendleton went on in the same measured tones; “four men have
told me how much they despise me.” She walked slowly up and down the
room. Miss Decker sank upon the divan, incredulity, curiosity,
expectation, feminine satisfaction marching across her face in rapid
procession.

“I have always maintained that a married woman has a perfect right to
flirt,” continued Mrs. Pendleton. “The more if she has married an old
man and life is somewhat of a bore. ‘Why do you marry an old man?’ snaps
the virtuous world. ‘What a contemptible creature you are to marry for
anything but love!’ it cries, as it eats the dust at Mammon’s feet. I
married an old man because with the wisdom of twenty, I had made up my
mind that I could never love and that position and wealth alone made up
the sum of existence. I had more excuse than a girl who has been always
poor, for I had never known the arithmetic of money until my father
failed, the year before I married. People who have never known wealth do
not realise the purely physical suffering of those inured to