leadership. She was superficially deferential to Mrs. Van Horne's older
standing and vastly greater wealth, but she swiftly gained the real
ascendancy. Her apparent submission of everything to Mrs. Van Horne's
wisdom, while adroitly making up a judgment for the undecided little
lady, was just what Mrs. Van Horne liked, and in three months'
acquaintance that lady had come to lean more and more on Mrs. Hilbrough.
The intimacy with so close a friend rendered life much more comfortable
for Mrs. Van Horne, in that it relieved her from taking advice of her
sisters-in-law, who always gave counsel with a consciousness of
superiority. Now she could appear in her family with opinions and
purposes apparently home-made. To a woman of Mrs. Hilbrough's cleverness
the friendship with one whose brooks ran gold rendered social success
certain.

Mrs. Hilbrough was a natural promoter. Her energy inclined her to take
hold of a new enterprise for the mere pleasure of pushing it. She felt a
real delight in the religious passions awakened by Mrs. Frankland's
addresses; she foresaw an interesting career opening up before that
gifted woman, and to help her would give Mrs. Hilbrough a complex
pleasure. That Mrs. Frankland's addresses if given in Mrs. Van Horne's
parlors would excite attention and make a great stir she foresaw, and
for many reasons she would like to bring this about. Mrs. Hilbrough did
not analyze her motives; that would have been tiresome. She entered them
all up in a sort of lump sum to the credit of her religious zeal, and
was just a little pleased to find so much of her early devotion to
religion left over. Let the entry stand as she made it. Let us not be of
the class unbearable who are ever trying to dissipate those lovely
illusions that keep alive human complacency and make life endurable.

Mrs. Hilbrough contrived to bring Mrs. Frankland with her abounding
enthusiasm and her wide-sweeping curves of inflection and gesture into
acquaintance with the great but rather pulpy Mrs. Van Horne. The natural
inequality of forces in the two did the rest. Mrs. Van Horne, weary of
the inevitable limitations of abnormal wealth, and fatigued in the vain
endeavor to procure any satisfaction which bore the slightest proportion
to the vast family accretion, found a repose she had longed for when she
was caught up in the fiery chariot of Mrs. Frankland's eloquent talk.
All the vast mass of things that had confronted and bullied her so long