ed, but of which she was entirely unaware. Through
his words she saw to an ideal. His most trivial actions were ascribed
to motives of a dignity which would have been ridiculous, if it had
not been a little pathetic. The woods-life, the striving of the pioneer
kindled her imagination. She seized upon the great facts of them and
fitted those facts with reasons of her own. Her insight perceived the
adventurous spirit, the battle-courage, the indomitable steadfastness
which always in reality lie back of these men of the frontier to
urge them into the life; and of them constructed conscious motives
of conduct. To her fancy the lumbermen, of whom Thorpe was one, were
self-conscious agents of advance. They chose hardship, loneliness,
the strenuous life because they wished to clear the way for a higher
civilization. To her it seemed a great and noble sacrifice. She did not
perceive that while all this is true, it is under the surface, the real
spur is a desire to get on, and a hope of making money. For, strangely
enough, she differentiated sharply the life and the reasons for it.
An existence in subduing the forest was to her ideal; the making of
a fortune through a lumbering firm she did not consider in the least
important. That this distinction was most potent, the sequel will show.

In all of it she was absolutely sincere, and not at all stupid. She had
always had all she could spend, without question. Money meant nothing to
her, one way or the other. If need was, she might have experienced some
difficulty in learning how to economize, but none at all in adjusting
herself to the necessity of it. The material had become, in all
sincerity, a basis for the spiritual. She recognized but two sorts of
motives; of which the ideal, comprising the poetic, the daring, the
beautiful, were good; and the material, meaning the sordid and selfish,
were bad. With her the mere money-getting would have to be allied with
some great and poetic excuse.

That is the only sort of aristocracy, in the popular sense of the word,
which is real; the only scorn of money which can be respected.

There are some faces which symbolize to the beholder many subtleties
of soul-beauty which by no other method could gain expression. Those
subtleties may not, probably do not, exist in the possessor of the face.
The power of such a countenance lies not so much in what it actually
represents, as in the suggestion it holds out to another. So often it is
with a be