had deceived themselves in thinking it was her brains that had made them like her.  As Henrietta, with mournful cynicism, put it:  “Men the world over care little about women beyond their physical charm.  To realize it, look at us American women, who can do nothing toward furthering men’s ambitions.  We’ve only our physical charms to offer; we fall when we lose them.  And so our old women and our homely women, except those that work or that have big houses and social power, have no life of their own, live on sufferance, alone or the slaves of their daughters or of some pretty young woman to whom they attach themselves.”

The days dragged for Adelaide.  “I’m afraid he’ll write,” said she—­meaning that she hoped he would.  Indeed, she felt that he had written, but had destroyed the letters.  And she was right; almost all the time he could spare from his efforts to save his father from a sick but obstinately active man’s bad judgment was given to writing to her—­formal letters which he tore up as too formal, passionate letters which he destroyed as unwarranted and unwise, when he had not yet, face to face, in words, told her his love and drawn from her what he believed was in her heart.  The days dragged; she kept away from Henrietta, from all “our set,” lest they should read in her dejected countenance the truth, and more.

CHAPTER XXIV

DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES

Madelene’s anteroom was full of poor people.  They flocked to her, though she did not pauperize them by giving her services free.  She had got the reputation of miraculous cures, the theory in the tenements being that her father had swindled his satanic “familiar” by teaching his daughter without price what he had had to pay for with his immortal soul.  Adelaide refused the chair a sick-looking young artisan awkwardly pressed upon her.  Leaning against the window seat, she tried to interest herself in her fellow-invalids.  But she had not then the secret which unlocks the mystery of faces; she was still in the darkness in which most of us proudly strut away our lives, deriding as dreamers or cranks those who are in the light and see.  With almost all of us the innate sympathies of race, which give even wolves and vultures the sense of fraternal companionship in the storm and stress of the struggle for existence, are deep overlaid with various kinds of that egotistic ignorance called class feeling.  Adelaide felt sorry for “the poor,” but she had yet to learn that she was of them, as poor in other and more important ways as they in money and drawing-room manners.  Surfaces and the things of the surface obscured or distorted all the realities for her, as for most of us; and the fact that her intelligence laughed at and scorned her perverted instincts was of as little help to her as it is to most of us.

When Madelene was free she said to her sister-in-law, in mock seriousness, “Well, and what can I do for you!” as if she were another patient.