t them all under her feet--trample them
down and make room for something better; but for what? She did not
know. She was twenty-one, wealthy, her own mistress, and was tired of
it all. When she drove past laughing Kora on the avenue she was more
tired of it than ever.

"How am I better than she but by accident?" she asked herself. "She
amuses herself--poor little bondslave, who has only changed masters! I
amuse myself (without a master, it is true, and more elegantly,
perhaps), but with as little usefulness to the world."

She felt ashamed when she thought of Alain and his mother, who seemed
to have lived only to help others. They had given over the power to
her, and how poorly she had acquitted herself!

Once--when she first came with the dowager to Paris--the days had been
all too short for her plans and dreams of usefulness; how long ago
that seemed.

Now, she knew that the owner of wealth is the victim of multitudinous
schemes of the mendicant, whether of the street corner or the
fashionable missions. She had lost faith in the efficacy of alms. No
cause came to her with force enough to re-awaken her enthusiasms.
Everything was so tame--so old!

One day she read in a journal that the usefulness of Kora as a dancer
was over. There had been an accident at the theatre, her foot was
smashed; not badly enough to call for amputation, but too much for her
ever to dance again.

The Marquise wondered if the fair-weather friends would desert her
now. She had heard of Trouvelot, an exquisite who followed the
fashions in everything, and Kora had succeeded in being the fashion
for two seasons. She was just as pretty, no doubt--just as adorable,
but--

As the weeks of that winter went by rumors from the Western world were
thick with threats of strife. State after State had seceded. The South
was marshalling her forces, training her men, urging the necessity of
defending State rights and maintaining their power to govern a portion
as ably as they had the whole of the United States during the eighty
years of its governmental life. The North, with its factories, its
foreign commerce, and its manifold requirements, had bred the
politicians of the country. But the South, with its vast agricultural
States, its wealth, and its traditions of landed ancestry, had
produced the orators--the statesman--the men who had shone most
brilliantly in the pages of their national history.

From the shores of France one could watch some pret