n a manner
obtained, assimilated.

"Oh yes," Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a smile,
"I must keep you. I'll do anything you like to make myself more--worth
while. I'll read for the pure idea. I think I'll take up modelling.
There's rather a good man here just now."

"Yes," Hilda assented. "Read for the pure idea--take up modelling. It
is most expedient, especially if you marry. Women who like those things
sometimes have geniuses for sons. But for me, so far as I count--oh,
my dear, do nothing more. You are already an achieved effect--a
consummation of the exquisite in every way. Generations have been chosen
among for you; your person holds the inheritance of all that is gracious
and tender and discriminating in a hundred years. You are as rare as I
am, and if there is anything you would take from me, I would make more
than one exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre--the feeling you
have for fine shades of morality and taste--all that makes you a lady,
my dear."

"Such niminy piminy things," said Alicia, contradicting the light
of satisfaction in her eyes. The sound of a step came from the room
overhead, and the light died out. "And what good do they do me?" she
cried in soft misery. "What good do they do me!"

"Considerably less than they ought. Why aren't you up there now? What
simple, honester opportunity do you want than a sick-room in your own
house?"

Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side. "Oh,
hush!" she cried. "Go on!"

"It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you. The room should be
full of cool refreshing hints of what you are. Your profile should come
between him and the twilight with a scent of violets."

"It sounds like a plot," Alicia murmured.

"It IS a plot. Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a plot.
If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you
perceive--the scheme the universe is built on. We wouldn't have lent
ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we're
naturally too scrupulous, but nobody asked us. 'Without our aid He did
us make,' you know."

"But--deliberately--to go so far! I couldn't, I couldn't, even if I
could."

Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the back
and the end of the sofa. Her hands drooped in their vigour, her knees
were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple lines. In her
symmetry and strength and the warm clou