easide."

"Why not? Such things are kindly enough; they do good! They are
excellent things for a girl to interest herself in."

"But it wouldn't amuse me at all, Powers! I should be bored to death."

"And you are going to think of nothing but amusing yourself all your
life?" he asked slowly.

"Why not?" she answered lightly.

Powers turned his face away in quick vexation, to encounter his mother's
disapproving glance focused on Eleanor from a near-by table.

For Lady Fiske, ever ready to further her son's scientific projects, had
lent the girl her social patronage, and had tried to blind herself to
the arrant selfishness and inconsideration that she everywhere
encountered in their intercourse. Between Eleanor and Powers' sister
Marian there was almost less in common, for the Eleanor of a month ago
had ceased to exist. Beautiful, brilliant, hard, she flitted like a
butterfly through the world that Powers had promised her, beating her
wings in a mad pursuit of amusement and pleasure, commanding homage and
self-sacrifice with a touch as hard as steel.

Powers breathed a long sigh and there was a careworn look in his eyes as
he glanced again at the girl in front of him.

Almost immediately Lady Fiske rose, and the women passed out. Trowse
stood back among the shadows behind the small table at which he had been
sitting, and steadfastly watched the girl of whom he and Marian Fiske
had been talking. Prosperity had indeed had a wonderful effect upon
Eleanor's looks. The light of perfect health had flushed her delicate
cheeks, her figure had filled out; she carried herself with a grace and
confidence which took no count of those days of slow torture through
which she had passed. Yet there was about her beauty some faint note of
peculiarity which had puzzled others before Trowse. He asked himself
what it was as she passed out, a queen running the gantlet of a court of
admiring eyes, fresh, exquisitely natural, the living embodiment of
light-hearted gaiety. When at last the door was closed and the men drew
nearer together, he smiled quietly to himself.

"It is like one of those pictures," he murmured, "which come near to
breaking the heart of the painter. It is perfect in color and form, it
is beautiful--and yet it does not live. There is no background."

He moved to a table nearer the center of the room from which he could
watch his host. The heavily shaded lights were kind enough to the faces
of the men who sat laughi