d to her vanity.
There are women who enjoy the gift with but little thought of the
giver. In Mrs. Vandervoort's spacious parlors she has received
compliments and attentions from people of note with a thrill of
triumph; she is not less pleased with her present interview. It is
almost as if Wilmarth had asked her for sympathy, interest, and she has
so much to bestow. Gertrude has spent her days in novel-reading, going
into other people's joys and woes. Marcia always lives in them
directly. She recasts the events, and makes herself the centre of the
episode. She is quite certain she could have done better in the
exigency than the friend she contemplates. She could have loved more
deeply, been wiser, stronger, tenderer, and more patient. There would
be no end to her virtues or her devotion. Men are certainly
short-sighted to choose these weak or cold or indifferent women, when
there are others with just the right mental equipoise.

She springs into her phaeton and starts up Dolly. There is a quiver and
glow of spring in the air, grown softer since morning, a breath of
sweetness, and Marcia's mood is exultant. She has bearded the lion in
his den, and his roar was not terrific. It is the power of Una, the
sweet and gentle woman. How desperately melancholy he looked; what a
touch of cynicism there was in his tone, engendered by loneliness and
too much communing with self. Instantly she feels herself capable of
consoling, of restoring to hope, to animation, to the delights of
living.

And Marcia enjoys living very much indeed, if she can only have money.
There never has been a day when she would have exchanged her pony for
Laura's piano. She can play with considerable fashionable brilliance,
but of the divine compensations of music she knows nothing. When Violet
sits and plays for hours without an audience it seems silly to Marcia.
She cannot understand the subtle and intense delight; for her there
must always be _one_ in the audience, if no more.

She wears an air of mystery at the dinner-table, and is apparently
abstracted trying on her new emotions. Floyd is wondering if all this
has not been very dull for Violet. If there only was some one to take a
vital interest in her. They have begun to make neighborhood calls, and
cards are left for Mrs. Floyd Grandon, invitations to teas and quiet
gatherings. Violet cannot go alone, and Floyd is so often engaged or
away. Mrs. Grandon does not trouble herself about her daughter-in-l