d vultures the sense of fraternal
companionship in the storm and stress of the struggle for existence, are
deep overlaid with various kinds of that egotistic ignorance called class
feeling. Adelaide felt sorry for "the poor," but she had yet to learn
that she was of them, as poor in other and more important ways as they in
money and drawing-room manners. Surfaces and the things of the surface
obscured or distorted all the realities for her, as for most of us; and
the fact that her intelligence laughed at and scorned her perverted
instincts was of as little help to her as it is to most of us.

When Madelene was free she said to her sister-in-law, in mock
seriousness, "Well, and what can I do for _you_!" as if she were
another patient.

Adelaide's eyes shifted. Clearly Madelene's keen, pretense-scattering
gaze was not one to invite to inspect a matter which might not look at
all well stripped of its envelopes of phrase and haze. She wished she had
not come; indeed, she had been half-wishing it during the whole
three-quarters of an hour of watching and thinking on Madelene's
wonderful life, so crowded with interest, with achievement, with all that
Hiram Ranger's daughter called, and believed, "the real thing."

"Nothing, nothing at all," replied she to Madelene's question. "I just
dropped in to annoy you with my idle self--or, maybe, to please you. You
know we're taught at church that a large part of the joy of the saved
comes from watching the misery of the damned."

But Madelene had the instinct of the physician born. "She has something
on her mind and wants me to help her," she thought. Aloud she said: "I
feel idle, myself. We'll sit about for an hour, and you'll stay to dinner
with Arthur and me--we have it here to-day, as your mother is going out.
Afterwards I must do my round."

A silence, with Adelaide wondering where Ross was and just when he would
return. Then Madelene went on: "I've been trying to persuade your mother
to give up the house, change it into a hospital."

The impudence of it! _Their_ house, _their_ home; and this newcomer into
the family--a newcomer from nowhere--trying to get it away from them!
"Mother said something about it," said Adelaide frostily. "But she
didn't say _you_ had been at her. I think she ought to be left alone in
her old age."

"The main thing is to keep her interested in life, don't you think?"
suggested Madelene, noting how Adelaide was holding herself in check, but
disre