She heard the call of the idols.  She could not resist and bowed down and worshiped them.  Before the year had passed she had plunged into hopeless debt and in her mad devotion sacrificed her husband with all his hopes and honest ambitions upon the altar.  The music, the lights, the dresses, the compliments, the promise of opening doors into the society in which she wanted to shine, for a time drowned the sight of his suffering and pain.  Then suddenly he yielded to temptation, was discovered taking money that was not his and the gods of fashion and pleasure forgot them both; the doors of society closed and she was left with nothing but her bitter thoughts.  It was a costly sacrifice but a common one which the Idols accept again and again.

Hardly two blocks below was another home with its lawn, its flowers, its neat window boxes and its young trees.  There in his nursery was a little two-year-old.  He stretched out his hand to his mother and cried when she passed through the hall and down stairs.  He had not been well for some days and missed his old nurse who had been dismissed for a slight offense the week before.  He did not like the new nurse.  His mother did not know much about her.  She seemed kind and she was very courteous in her manner.  The mother was going in her friend’s machine, out to the club-house for bridge.  She was a little late and could not stop though the child had looked very pitiful and rather pale.  He still cried despite the nurse’s warnings, coaxings and threats.  At last she grew impatient, seized him and shook him until there was no breath left to scream, laid him on his little bed and left the room.  After a while soft, heart-broken baby sobs came from the tired child and he lay still as she had bidden him.

At the club women dressed in all the extremes of fashion, laughed and chatted or grew tense and strained as they exchanged their cards.  Over in one corner some of the younger women blew curls of smoke into the air.  The baby’s mother sat there.

It seemed very lonely to the little boy lying in his nursery.  The sobs ceased, the baby grew interested in life once more, climbed over the side of the bed, slipped to the floor, softly opened the door into the hall.  His eyes were swollen and he was weak from the shaking and the strain of the day and when he reached the shining staircase, his foot slipped.

The nurse’s face grew pale when she picked up the unconscious child.  The doctor said he would live but the spine seemed to be injured and the full result of the fall he could not predict.

While they were bending anxiously over him, he opened his eyes and said “Muvver.”  Just then she entered the hall and they could hear the congratulatory words of her friend.  She had won.  Then she started up the stairs.  Let us draw the curtain, for on the altar of Fashion and Pleasure a mother has offered as a sacrifice, her child.

You who have read this chapter have been looking with me upon a series of rapidly moving pictures.  Perhaps they have seemed too dramatic as they have passed.  But they are not fiction—­they picture facts.  They are not in the past.  The same scenes are being repeated now all over our country and across the sea.  No one can number the worshipers of the Twin Idols and no one can estimate the awful cost of the devotion of their followers.