ad been done
over last year in gray and old rose, with the "suit" in Circassian
walnut, and wainscoted walls which harmonized admirably. It was a
charming cloister, all most captivating to the eye, with the possible
exception of the dressing-table, which rather bristled with implements
and looked just a thought too businesslike.

Carlisle loafed and invited her soul. Her glorious ash-gold hair, whose
habit of crinkling from the roots was so exasperating to contemporaries
of her own sex, swept loose over the pillows, charmingly framing
her face....

While the Beach episode itself was now long since closed and done with,
it was not unnatural that the memory of Dalhousie's friend, the Mr.
Vivian, should have remained in Carlisle's mind, for Mr. Vivian had
addressed such words to her as had never before sounded upon her ears.
These words had clung by their sheer astounding novelty. To have God
petitioned to pity you by a shabby nobody in a pictorial tie: here was
an experience that invited some elucidation. For a time the girl's
thoughts had attacked the nobody's sincerity: he was merely failure
pretending to despise success. But, not ungifted at self-suasion though
she was, she had not seemed to find solid footing here; and she had
early been driven irresistibly to quite a different conclusion.
Evidently this man Mr. Vivian was a queer kind of street-preacher type,
victim of a pious mania which rendered him dangerously unsound in the
head. This, obviously, was the truth of the matter. On no other theory
could his pitying her be satisfactorily explained.

It was true that, with the dying down of her own sense of vague ambient
perils, she herself had come once more to feel dreadfully sorry for Jack
Dalhousie, and even to admit in her meditations that she could have
afforded to be more magnanimous in defending him from gossip. But then
that did not at all change the fact that Dalhousie deserved the severest
punishment for all the trouble and worry he had brought her. It clearly
was not right, was not moral, to make things too easy for wrongdoers.
She had gradually come to see herself as a custodian of the moral law in
this quarter, a tribunal of justice which, while upholding the
salubriousness of punition, yet strives to keep as large and generous
as it can.

Therefore it followed as the night the day that Mr. Vivian, who could
work himself up to the condition of feeling sorry for her as she
discharged her painful dutie