ing there
was to be known. Month by month he grew fatter and lazier and slower of
speech. Henrietta pretended to be irritated against him, and the town had
the habit of saying that "If Hastings had some of his wife's 'get up' he
wouldn't be making her unhappy but would be winning a big name for
himself." In fact, had Hastings tried to bestir himself at something
definite in the way of action, Henrietta would have been really disturbed
instead of simply pretending to be. She had a good mind, a keen wit that
had become bitter with unlicensed indulgence; but she was as indolent and
purposeless as her husband. All her energy went in talk about doing
something, and every day she had a new scheme, with yesterday's forgotten
or disdained.

Adelaide pretended to herself to regard Henrietta as an energetic and
stimulating person, though she knew that Henrietta's energy, like her
own, like that of most women of the sheltered, servant-attended class,
was a mere blowing off of steam by an active but valveless engine of a
mind. But this pretense enabled her to justify herself for long mornings
and afternoons at the Country Club with Henrietta. They talked of
activity, of accomplishing this and that and the other; they read
fitfully at serious books; they planned novels and plays; they separated
each day with a comfortable feeling that they had been usefully employed.
And each did learn much from the other; but, as each confirmed the other
in the habitual mental vices of the women, and of an increasing number of
the men, of our quite comfortable classes, the net result of their
intercourse was pitifully poor, the poorer for their fond delusions that
they were improving themselves. They laughed at the "culture craze"
which, raging westward, had seized upon all the women of Saint X with
incomes, or with husbands or fathers to support them in idleness--the
craze for thinking, reading, and talking cloudily or muddily on cloudy or
muddy subjects. Henrietta and Adelaide jeered; yet they were themselves
the victims of another, and, if possible, more poisonous, bacillus of the
same sluggard family.

One morning Adelaide, in graceful ease in her favorite nook in the small
northwest portico of the club house, was reading a most imposingly bound
and illustrated work on Italian architecture written by a smatterer for
smatterers. She did a great deal of reading in this direction because it
was also the direction of her talent, and so she could m