isdained. She had always striven to find friends among people of wealth
and distinction. How was Marian to know that when John began to achieve
wealth and distinction, Eileen would covet him also?

Marian could not know that Eileen had studied her harder than she ever
studied any book, that she had deliberately set herself to make the most
of every defect or idiosyncrasy in Marian, at the same time offering
herself as a charming substitute. Marian was prepared to be the mental,
the spiritual, and the physical mate of a man.

Eileen was not prepared to be in truth and honor any of these. She was
prepared to make any emergency of life subservient to her own selfish
desires. She was prepared to use any man with whom she came in contact
for the furtherance of any whim that at the hour possessed her. What she
wanted was unbridled personal liberty, unlimited financial resources.

Marian, almost numbed with physical fatigue and weeks of mental strain,
came repeatedly against the dead wall of ignorance when she tried to
fathom the change that had taken place between herself and John Gilman
and between herself and Eileen. Daniel Thorne was an older man than
Doctor Strong. He had accumulated more property. Marian had sufficient
means at her command to make it unnecessary for her to acquire a
profession or work for her living, but she had always been interested in
and loved to plan houses and help her friends with buildings they
were erecting. When the silence and the loneliness of her empty home
enveloped her, she had begun, at first as a distraction, to work on the
drawings for a home that an architect had made for one of her neighbors.
She had been able to suggest so many comforts and conveniences, and so
to revise these plans that, at first in a desultory way, later in
real earnest, she had begun to draw plans for houses. Then, being of
methodical habit and mathematical mind, she began scaling up the plans
and figuring on the cost of building, and so she had worked until she
felt that she was evolving homes that could be built for the same amount
of money and lived in with more comfort and convenience than the homes
that many of her friends were having planned for them by architects of
the city.

To one spot in the valley she had gone from childhood as a secret place
in which to dream and study. She had loved that retreat until it had
become a living passion with her. The more John Gilman neglected her,
the more she concent