aroline as a materialist, and called her
hard.

The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite policy, which
Caroline gave, was far from a false one; but there was this to be said
for her--that there were extenuating circumstances which her friends
could not know.

If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she was apt to
regard with distrust everything which inclined toward extravagance, it
was not because she was unacquainted with other standards than her own,
or had never seen another side of life. She had grown up in Brooklyn,
in a shabby little house under the vacillating administration of her
father, a music teacher who usually neglected his duties to write
orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have no especial
need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile
self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labor that
brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labor that brought him
only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the
orchestra everything under heaven except melody.

It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in. The mother, who
idolized her husband as the music lord of the future, was left to a
lifelong battle with broom and dustpan, to neverending conciliatory
overtures to the butcher and grocer, to the making of her own gowns
and of Caroline's, and to the delicate task of mollifying Auguste's
neglected pupils.

The son, Heinrich, a painter, Caroline's only brother, had inherited all
his father's vindictive sensitiveness without his capacity for slavish
application. His little studio on the third floor had been much
frequented by young men as unsuccessful as himself, who met there to
give themselves over to contemptuous derision of this or that artist
whose industry and stupidity had won him recognition. Heinrich, when he
worked at all, did newspaper sketches at twenty-five dollars a week. He
was too indolent and vacillating to set himself seriously to his art,
too irascible and poignantly self-conscious to make a living, too much
addicted to lying late in bed, to the incontinent reading of poetry, and
to the use of chloral to be anything very positive except painful. At
twenty-six he shot himself in a frenzy, and the whole wretched affair
had effectually shattered his mother's health and brought on the decline
of which she died. Caroline had been fond of him, but she felt a certain
relief when he n