"And what is the one spiritual disease?" asked Flambeau, smiling.

"Oh, thinking one is quite well," said his friend.

Flambeau was more interested in the quiet little office below him than
in the flamboyant temple above. He was a lucid Southerner, incapable
of conceiving himself as anything but a Catholic or an atheist; and new
religions of a bright and pallid sort were not much in his line. But
humanity was always in his line, especially when it was good-looking;
moreover, the ladies downstairs were characters in their way. The office
was kept by two sisters, both slight and dark, one of them tall and
striking. She had a dark, eager and aquiline profile, and was one of
those women whom one always thinks of in profile, as of the clean-cut
edge of some weapon. She seemed to cleave her way through life. She had
eyes of startling brilliancy, but it was the brilliancy of steel rather
than of diamonds; and her straight, slim figure was a shade too stiff
for its grace. Her younger sister was like her shortened shadow,
a little greyer, paler, and more insignificant. They both wore a
business-like black, with little masculine cuffs and collars. There are
thousands of such curt, strenuous ladies in the offices of London,
but the interest of these lay rather in their real than their apparent
position.

For Pauline Stacey, the elder, was actually the heiress of a crest
and half a county, as well as great wealth; she had been brought up in
castles and gardens, before a frigid fierceness (peculiar to the modern
woman) had driven her to what she considered a harsher and a higher
existence. She had not, indeed, surrendered her money; in that there
would have been a romantic or monkish abandon quite alien to her
masterful utilitarianism. She held her wealth, she would say, for use
upon practical social objects. Part of it she had put into her business,
the nucleus of a model typewriting emporium; part of it was distributed
in various leagues and causes for the advancement of such work among
women. How far Joan, her sister and partner, shared this slightly
prosaic idealism no one could be very sure. But she followed her leader
with a dog-like affection which was somehow more attractive, with its
touch of tragedy, than the hard, high spirits of the elder. For Pauline
Stacey had nothing to say to tragedy; she was understood to deny its
existence.

Her rigid rapidity and cold impatience had amused Flambeau very much on
the first occ