Madelene colored violently.  “I never heard that word in this house before,” she said stiffly.

“Nor I,” replied Walpurga, the pink and white.  “And I think it’s high time—­with you nearly twenty-two and me nearly twenty.”

At dinner her father said:  “Well, Lena, so you’ve got a beau at last.  I’d given up hope.”

“For Heaven’s sake don’t scare him away, father!” cried Walpurga.

“A pretty poor excuse,” pursued the doctor.  “I doubt if Arthur Ranger can make enough to pay his own board in a River Street lodging house.”

“It took courage—­real courage—­to go to work as he did,” replied Madelene, her color high.

“Yes,” admitted her father, “if he sticks to it.”

“He will stick to it,” affirmed Madelene.

“I think so,” assented her father, dropping his teasing pretense and coming out frankly for Arthur.  “When a man shows that he has the courage to cross the Rubicon, there’s no need to worry about whether he’ll go on or turn back.”

“You mustn’t let him know he’s the only beau you’ve ever had, Meg,” cautioned her sister.

“And why not?” demanded Madelene.  “If I ever did care especially for a man, I’d not care for him because other women had.  And I shouldn’t want a man to be so weak and vain as to feel that way about me.”

It was a temptation to that aloof and isolated, yet anything but lonely or lonesome, household to discuss this new and strange phenomenon—­the intrusion of an outsider, and he a young man.  But the earnestness in Madelene’s voice made her father and her sister feel that to tease her further would be impertinent.

Arthur had said he would not call until the next week because then he would be at work again.  He went once more to Dr. Schulze’s, but was careful to go in office hours.  He did not see Madelene—­though she, behind the white sash curtains of her own office, saw him come, watched him go until he was out of sight far down the street.  On Monday he went to work, really to work.  No more shame; no more shirking or shrinking; no more lingering on the irrevocable.  He squarely faced the future, and, with his will like his father’s, set dogged and unconquerable energy to battering at the obstacles before him.  “All a man needs,” said he to himself, at the end of the first day of real work, “is a purpose.  He never knows where he’s at until he gets one.  And once he gets it, he can’t rest till he has accomplished it.”

What was his purpose?  He didn’t know—­beyond a feeling that he must lift himself from his present position of being an object of pity to all Saint X and the sort of man that hasn’t the right to ask any woman to be his wife.

CHAPTER XVI

A CAST-OFF SLIPPER