conversation of women--the women she felt socially at ease with--tedious,
and their rather problematic power of appreciation limited to what came
from men. As she grew older, and less and less pleasing to the eye, the
men showed more and more clearly how they had deceived themselves in
thinking it was her brains that had made them like her. As Henrietta,
with mournful cynicism, put it: "Men the world over care little about
women beyond their physical charm. To realize it, look at us American
women, who can do nothing toward furthering men's ambitions. We've only
our physical charms to offer; we fall when we lose them. And so our old
women and our homely women, except those that work or that have big
houses and social power, have no life of their own, live on sufferance,
alone or the slaves of their daughters or of some pretty young woman to
whom they attach themselves."

The days dragged for Adelaide. "I'm afraid he'll write," said
she--meaning that she hoped he would. Indeed, she felt that he had
written, but had destroyed the letters. And she was right; almost all
the time he could spare from his efforts to save his father from a sick
but obstinately active man's bad judgment was given to writing to
her--formal letters which he tore up as too formal, passionate letters
which he destroyed as unwarranted and unwise, when he had not yet, face
to face, in words, told her his love and drawn from her what he believed
was in her heart. The days dragged; she kept away from Henrietta, from
all "our set," lest they should read in her dejected countenance the
truth, and more.

CHAPTER XXIV

DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES

Madelene's anteroom was full of poor people. They flocked to her, though
she did not pauperize them by giving her services free. She had got the
reputation of miraculous cures, the theory in the tenements being that
her father had swindled his satanic "familiar" by teaching his daughter
without price what he had had to pay for with his immortal soul. Adelaide
refused the chair a sick-looking young artisan awkwardly pressed upon
her. Leaning against the window seat, she tried to interest herself in
her fellow-invalids. But she had not then the secret which unlocks the
mystery of faces; she was still in the darkness in which most of us
proudly strut away our lives, deriding as dreamers or cranks those who
are in the light and see. With almost all of us the innate sympathies of
race, which give even wolves an