common. Now all these uncommon things are painted pots, or
illusions. Life rolls on always in a common, prosaic movement.
Stop making painted pots, and go out to walk with Puff and Miss
Mary."

Cara listened attentively, but with an incredulous expression of
eyes, which were fixed on her sister's face.

"Very well, I will go to walk, but what you have said is not
true, Ira. It is not painted pots that mamma is suffering and
sick, that father goes out to dine for a whole week, and does not
come to her at all; even that--man, going out to-day, began to
cry in the antechamber--I saw him by chance--he wanted to say
something to me, but I ran away--"

Irene shrugged her shoulders.

"You will be a poetess, perhaps, you exaggerate everything so
terribly. Mamma is not troubled, she only has neuralgia. Father
does not dine with us because he has so many invitations, and Pan
Kranitski struck his nose against something which you, in poetic
imagination, took for crying. Men never cry, and sensible girls,
instead of filling their heads with painted pots, go to walk
while good weather lasts and the sun shines. The doctor tells you
to walk every day, not in the evening, but about this hour."

"I am going, I am going! You drive me away!"

She went on a number of steps, and turned again toward her aster:

"Father is angry at Maryan--I see that very clearly. Everything
in this house is, somehow, so strange."

She went out, but Irene clasped her hands, and for some seconds
squeezed them with all her might, and thought:

"That child will soon look at life just as I have been looking at
it for some time past. It is necessary to foresee, absolutely
necessary!" She returned to her reminiscences. Her mother said to
her father:

"Our fortune is now considerable."

"In that direction," answered her father, "it never can be too
great, nor even sufficient."

Then, playing with her beautiful hair, he asked:

"But do you believe that I love you?"

After some hesitation she answered:

"No. I have lost that faith, I lost it some time ago."

Later there were many other words, some of which Irene
remembered:

"The very best guardianship in this world," said her father, "is
wealth. Whoso has that will never lack mind, even; since, in ease
of need, he can buy mind from other men.

"In the training of our children you will expend all that is
requisite. You will rear for me our daughters to be grand ladies;
will you not? Educate th