o Arden in the hope that something might suggest itself; that
a gleam of sense might be shown by the one or the other of the lunatics
in gray for whose good I was racking my brains. But I found things worse
than I had left them. Sylvia had stirred herself into a spirit of
combativeness of which no one would have supposed her capable, and had
actually endeavored to brow-beat her Mother Superior into the belief
that a Brotherhood Annex was not only necessary to the prosperity and
success of the House of Martha, but that it was absolutely wicked not to
have it. She had gone on in this strain until Marcia had become angry,
and then there had been a scene and tears, and much subsequent misery.

"I talked first with one doleful sister, and then with the other, with
the only result that I became nearly as doleful as they. In my despair I
went to Marcia, and urged her to acknowledge herself vanquished, to give
up this contest, which would be her ruin, to show herself a true woman,
and to take up the true work of her life. 'Oh, I couldn't do it,' she
said, and she looked as if she were going to cry, a most unusual thing
with her; 'if I went away, to-morrow they would be together, making
mud-pies for the children of the poor.' I sprang to my feet. 'Marcia
Raynor,' I cried, 'you made this House of Martha. You are the head and
the front, the top and the bottom of it. You are its founder and its
autocrat, it lives on your money,--for everybody knows that what these
sisters make wouldn't buy their pillboxes,--and now, having run it all
these years, and having brought yourself and Sylvia to the greatest
grief by it, it is your duty to put an end to it, to abolish it.'

"'Abolish the House of Martha?' she cried, with her great eyes blazing
at me.

"'Yes,' I said, 'abolish it, destroy it, annihilate it, declare it null,
void, dead and gone, utterly extinguished, and out of existence. You can
do this, and you ought to do this. It is your only way out of the
dreadful situation in which you have got yourself and Sylvia. Let the
other sisters go to some other institutions, or wherever they like. You
and Sylvia will be free, that is the great point. Now do not hesitate.
Stop supplies, dissolve the organization, break up the House of Martha,
and do it instantly.'

"She made one step towards me and seized me by the wrist. 'Janet,' she
said, 'I will do it.' And she did it that day. At present there is no
House of Martha."

I sat and gazed