it was that she should ostentatiously visit Charlie
Ferfola's wife, and speak of her as a darling creature, her particular
friend, whom she was doing her very best to keep out of an early
grave.

Charlie Ferrola said that the Van Astrachans were obtuse; and so, to
a certain degree, they were. In social matters they had a kind of
confiding simplicity. They were so much accustomed to regard positive
morals in the light of immutable laws of Nature, that it would not
have been easy to have made them understand that sliding scale of
estimates which is in use nowadays. They would probably have had but
one word, and that a very disagreeable one, to designate a married
woman who was in love with anybody but her husband. Consequently, they
were the very last people whom any gossip of this sort could ever
reach, or to whose ears it could have been made intelligible.

Mr. Van Astrachan considered Dick Follingsbee a swindler, whose proper
place was the State's prison, and whose morals could only be mentioned
with those of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Nevertheless, as Mrs. Follingsbee made it a point of rolling up her
eyes and sighing deeply when his name was mentioned,--as she attended
church on Sunday with conspicuous faithfulness, and subscribed to
charitable societies and all manner of good works,--as she had got
appointed directress on the board of an orphan asylum where Mrs. Van
Astrachan figured in association with her, that good lady was led to
look upon her with compassion, as a worthy woman who was making
the best of her way to heaven, notwithstanding the opposition of a
dissolute husband.

As for Rose, she was as fresh and innocent and dewy, in the hot whirl
and glitter and glare of New York, as a waving spray of sweet-brier,
brought in fresh with all the dew upon it.

She really had for Lillie a great deal of that kind of artistic
admiration which nice young girls sometimes have for very beautiful
women older than themselves; and was, like almost every one else,
somewhat bejuggled and taken in by that air of infantine sweetness and
simplicity which had survived all the hot glitter of her life, as if a
rose, fresh with dew, should lie unwilted in the mouth of a furnace.

Moreover, Lillie's face had a beauty this winter it had never worn:
the softness of a real feeling, the pathos of real suffering, at times
touched her face with something that was always wanting in it before.
The bitter waters of sin that she would drink