d dissenting. The dissent she
showed vigorously; the repulsion she concealed, sore with
herself because of the concealment. But she could not
lose Elfrida, she told herself; and besides, it was only
a matter of a little tolerance--time and life would change
her, tone her inner self down into the something altogether
exquisite and perfect that she was, to look at, now.

Elfrida called the Cardiffs' house the oasis of Kensington,
and valued her privileges there more than she valued
anything else in the circumstances about her, except,
perhaps, the privilege she had enjoyed in making the
single contribution, to the _Decade_ of which we know.
That was an event lustrous in her memory, the more lustrous
because it remained solitary and when the editor's check
made its tardy appearance she longed to keep it as a
glorious archive--glorious that is to say, in suggestion,
if not particularly impressive intrinsically. In the end
she fought the temptation of giving herself a dinner a
day for a fortnight out of it, and bought a slender gold
bangle with the money, which she slipped upon her wrist
with a resolution to keep it there always. It must be
believed that her personal decoration did not enter
materially into this design; the bangle was an emblem of
one success and an earnest of others. She wore it as she
might have worn a medal, except that a medal was a public
voice, and the little gold hoop spoke only to her.

After the triumph that the bangle signified Elfrida felt
most satisfaction in what was constantly present to her
mind as her conquest of the Cardiffs. She measured its
importance by their value. Her admiration for Janet's
work in the beginning had been as sincere as her emulation
of its degree of excellence had been passionate, and
neither feeling had diminished with their intimacy. In
Lawrence Cardiff she felt vaguely the qualities that made
him a marked man among his fellows, his intellectual
breadth and keenness, his poise of brain, if one might
call it so, and the _habilete_ with which, without
permitting it to be part of his character, he sometimes
allowed himself to charm even people of whom he disapproved.
These things were indeterminately present to her, and
led her often to speculate as to how it was that Mr.
Cardiff's work expressed him so little. It seemed to her
that the one purpose of a personality like his was its
expression--otherwise one might as well be of the ruck.
"You write with your intel