ement that comes to ours
comes from men. They invent our conveniences, they design our stoves
and arrange our sinks. Not because they know anything about it, but
because we're not interested."

"One would think you had done your own work for twenty years!" said
Mrs. Brown.

"I never did it," Mrs. Burgoyne answered smiling, "but I sometimes wish
I could. I sometimes envy those busy women who have small houses, new
babies, money cares--it must be glorious to rise to fresh emergencies
every hour of your life. A person like myself is handicapped. I can't
demonstrate that I believe what I say. Everyone thinks me merely a
little affected about it. If I were such a woman, I'd glory in clipping
my life of everything but the things I needed, and living like one of
my own children, as simply as a lot of peasants!"

"And no one would ever be any the wiser," said Mrs. Brown.

"I don't know. Quiet little isolated lives have a funny way of getting
out into the light. There was that little peasant girl at Domremy, for
instance; there was that gentle saint who preached poverty to the
birds; there was Eugenie Guerin, and the Cure of Ars, and the few
obscure little English weavers--and there was the President who split--"

"I thought we'd come to him!" chuckled the doctor.

"Well," Mrs. Burgoyne smiled, a little confused at having betrayed
hero-worship. "Well, and there was one more, the greatest of all, who
didn't found any asylums, or lead any crusade--" She paused.

"Surely," said the doctor, quietly. "Surely. I suppose that curing the
lame here, and the blind there, and giving the people their fill of
wine one day, and of bread and fishes the next, might be called
'dabbling' in these days. But the love that went with those things is
warming the world yet!"

"Well, but what can we DO?" demanded Mrs. Brown after a short silence.

"That's for us to find out," said Mrs. Burgoyne, cheerfully.

"A correct diagnosis is half a cure," ended the doctor, hopefully.

CHAPTER IX

Barry was the last guest to reach Holly Hall on the evening of Mrs.
Burgoyne's first dinner-party, and came in to find the great painter
who was her guest the centre of a laughing and talking group in the
long drawing-room. Mrs. Apostleman, with an open book of reproductions
from Whistler on her broad, brocade lap, had the armchair next to the
guest of honor, and Barry's quick look for his hostess discovered her
on a low hassock at the painter's knee,