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Miss Cornelis Van Gorder, indomitable spinster, last bearer of a name / which had been great in New York when New York was a red-roofed Nieuw / Amsterdam and Peter Stuyvesant a parvenu, sat propped up in bed in the / green room of her newly rented country house reading the morning / newspaper. Thus seen, with an old soft Paisley shawl tucked in about / her thin shoulders and without the stately gray transformation that / adorned her on less intimate occasions,-she looked much less formidable / and more innocently placid than those could ever have imagined who had / only felt the bite of her tart wit at such functions as the state Van / Gorder dinners. Patrician to her finger tips, independent to the roots / of her hair, she preserved, at sixty-five, a humorous and quenchless / curiosity in regard to every side of life, which even the full and / crowded years that already lay behind her had not entirely satisfied. / She was an Age and an Attitude, but she was more than that; she had / grown old without growing dull or losing touch with youth-her face had / the delicate strength of a fine cameo and her mild and youthful heart / preserved an innocent zest for adventure.
Wide travel, social leadership, the world of art and books, a dozen / charities, an existence rich with diverse experience-all these she had / enjoyed energetically and to the full-but she felt, with ingenious / vanity, that there were still sides to her character which even these / had not brought to light. As a little girl she had hesitated between / wishing to be a locomotive engineer or a famous bandit-and when she had / found, at seven, that the accident of sex would probably debar her from / either occupation, she had resolved fiercely that some time before she / died she would show the world in general and the Van Gorder clan in / particular that a woman was quite as capable of dangerous exploits as a / man. So far her life, while exciting enough at moments, had never / actually been dangerous and time was slipping away without giving her / an opportunity to prove her hardiness of heart. Whenever she thought of / this the fact annoyed her extremely-and she thought of it now.