s an affliction or a blessing.
It really isn't just to Providence to be so undecided about the
character of its actions--particularly when in this case it appears to
have arranged things so beautifully to suit everybody who is concerned."

"It was, to say the least, considerate," remarked Laura, with the
cynical flavour she adopted occasionally from Kemper or from Gerty, "and
it is certainly a merciful solution of the problem, but does it ever
occur to you," she added more earnestly, "to wonder what would have
happened if she hadn't died?"

"Oh, she simply had to die," said Gerty, "there was nothing else that
she could do in decency--not that she would have been greatly
influenced by such a necessity," she commented blandly.

"I'd like all the same to know how he would have met the difficulty, for
that he would have met it, I am perfectly assured."

"Well, I, for one, can afford to leave my curiosity unsatisfied,"
responded Gerty; then she added in a voice that was almost serious. "Do
you know there's really something strangely loveable about the man. I
sometimes think," she concluded with her fantastic humour, "that I might
have married him myself with very little effort on either side."

"And lived happily forever after on the _International Review?_"

"Oh, I don't know but what it would be quite as easy as to live on
clothes. I don't believe poverty, after all, is a bit worse than
boredom. What one wants is to be interested, and if one isn't, life is
pretty much the same in a surface car or in an automobile. I don't
believe I should have minded surface cars the least bit," she finished
pensively.

"Wait till you've tried them--I have."

"What really matters is the one great thing," pursued Gerty with a
positive philosophy, "and money has about as much relation to happiness
as the frame has to the finished picture--all it does is to show it off
to the world. Now I like being shown off, I admit--but I'd like it all
the better if there were a little more of the stuff upon the canvas."

"If you were only as happy as I am!" said Laura softly.

For a moment Gerty looked at her with a sweetness in which there was an
almost maternal understanding. "I wish I were, darling," was what she
answered.

Her hard, bright eyes grew suddenly wistful, and she looked at Laura as
if she would pierce through the enveloping flesh to the soul within. Of
all the people she had ever known Laura was the only one, she had
sometimes