The business on which he was seeing the Colonel required another day to complete.

There was little or nothing to do.
On the way the Colonel retailed more of the life history of Nannie Hedden, as he familiarly called her, and explained that, although this was her maiden name, she had subsequently become first Mrs.John Alexander Fleming, then, after a divorce, Mrs.Ira George Carter, and now, alas! was known among the exclusive set of fast livers, to which he belonged, as plain Hattie Starr, the keeper of a more or less secret house of ill repute.

Cowperwood did not take so much interest in all this until he saw her, and then only because of two children the Colonel told him about, one a girl by her first marriage, Berenice Fleming, who was away in a New York boarding-school, the other a boy, Rolfe Carter, who was in a military school for boys somewhere in the West.
"That daughter of hers," observed the Colonel, "is a chip of the old block, unless I miss my guess.

I only saw her two or three times a few years ago when I was down East at her mother's summer home; but she struck me as having great charm even for a girl of ten.

She's a lady born, if ever there was one.