rankland would have been the last person to advise an extreme course of
action. She admired the extravagance of religious devotion for its
artistic effect when used in oratory. It was the artistic effect she was
dreaming of now. Phillida got little from her but such generalities,
pitched in the key of her recent address; but what she got tended to
push her to yet greater extremes.

In the hour that followed, Phillida's habitually strenuous spirit
resolved and held itself ready for any surrender that might be demanded
of it. Is the mistaken soul that makes sacrifice needlessly through
false perceptions of duty intrinsically less heroic than the wiser
martyr for a worthy cause?

XXIV.

THE PARTING.

On that Thursday evening Millard dined at his club. Instead of signing a
joint order with a friend for a partnership dinner, he ordered and ate
alone. He chose a table in a deep window from which he could look out on
the passers-by. A rain had set in, and he watched the dripping umbrellas
that glistened in the lamplight as they moved under the windows, and
took note of the swift emergence of approaching vehicles and then of
their disappearance. His interest in the familiar street-world was
insipid enough, but even an insipid interest in external affairs he
found better than giving his mind up wholly to the internal drizzle of
melancholy thoughts.

Presently Millard became dimly conscious of a familiar voice in
conversation at the table in the next window. Though familiar, the voice
was not associated with the club-restaurant; it must be that of some
non-member brought in as the dinner-guest of a member. He could not make
out at first whose it was without changing his position, which he
disliked to do, the more that the voice excited disagreeable feelings,
and by some association not sufficiently distinct to enable him to make
out the person. But when the visitor, instead of leaving the direction
of the meal to his host, called out an exasperatingly imperative,
"Hist! waitah!" Millard was able to recognize his invisible neighbor.
Why should any member of a club so proper as the Terrapin ask Meadows?
But there he was with his inborn relish for bulldozing whatever
bulldozable creature came in his way. Once he had made him out, Millard
engaged in a tolerably successful effort to ignore his conversation,
returning again to his poor diversion of studying the people plashing
disconsolately along the wet street. It was o