sence. If I had a sister, she should not know there was
such a thing as bigamy. Good God!" wiping his forehead with his
handkerchief, "if women are not pure and spotless, what have we to
look up to? And these shallow girls, who propose to reform the world,
begin by dabbling with the filth of the gutter, if they do no worse?"

"Shallow girls?" He was so big and angry that she felt like a wren or
sparrow in his hold. But the stupidity of him! the blind idiocy!
She eyed him from head to foot with a bitterness and contempt
unutterable--a handsome six-foot animal, with his small brain filled
with smaller, worn-out prejudices! The way of escape had been set
before him, and he had spurned it--and her!

"I don't see what it can matter to you," she said politely,
disengaging herself, "whether I make friends with these people and am
stained with the filth of the gutter or not?" She had a half-insane
consciousness that she was playing her last card.

"Why, to be sure it matters. You and I have been good friends always,
Maria, and I don't like to see you fellowship
with that lot. What was it Bluhm called them?" laughing. "That was
rough in Bluhm--rough. They're women."

"You are going?"

"In the next train, yes, I waited to see a--a friend, but he did not
come. It's just as well, perhaps," his face saddened. "Well, good-bye,
Maria. Don't be offended at me for not approving of your friends. Why,
bless my soul! such talk is--it's not decent;" and with a careless
shake of the hand he was gone.

Maria told herself that she despised a man who could so dismiss the
great social problem and its prophets with a fillip of his thumb. She
turned to go in to the assemblage of prophets. They were all that was
left her in life. But she did not go in. She went to her bare chamber,
and took Hero up on her lap and cried over him. "_You_ love me,
doggy?" she said.

She had an attack of syncope that night, for which no pack or sitz
proved a remedy; and it was about that time that the long and
painful affection of the ulnar nerve began which almost destroyed her
usefulness as a surgeon.

CHAPTER XIII.

That evening, as Miss Muller sat alone with Hero in her room (just as
the neuralgia was beginning), the door opened and Miss Vogdes entered.
The girl turned a harassed, worn countenance toward Maria, and
stumbled awkwardly over her words. It was not, certainly, because
she was conscious that she had used William Muller cruelly. She ha