sublimation of their blended physical
selves--became the fragile vessel into which, drop by drop, the
essences of all their most unfortunate emotions were being distilled.

Sometimes, at a moment of perspicacity, the father's face was distorted
by a spasm of remorse. Looking at his child, he was thinking:

"By what right have we done this?"

For that matter, he was always oppressed by miseries foreign to normal
men. For instance, he fluctuated between the ardors of a pagan and an
anchorite, at one hour reembracing aestheticism, at another fleeing
back to a bleak sanctuary where he hoped to escape some vague, immense
reproach. Too complex for an irrevocable decision, too weak to stand
firm against the pressure either of pantheism or an absolutely
spiritual idea, he was an insignificant creature worried and torn
between two vast antagonists.

Then, too, he was afflicted with a frequent symptom of neuroticism,
namely, superstition; and this superstition was sharpened by the usual
morbid forebodings--the characteristic expectations of calamity.

He accepted the idea that there were persons who could fathom the
destinies of others, that the palm of one's hand was cryptic with one's
future fortunes, and that the remotest planets had an influence on
one's life. Furtively, then, as one might enter a place dedicated to
some shameful mystery, this erudite, handsome, wretched gentleman
slipped into the sanctums of the diviners, where, with a feeling of
degradation and imbecility, yet with a pounding heart, he listened to
prophecies uttered by the aid of playing cards, horoscopes, and crystal
balls.

All he asked was some assurance that he would presently find peace.
They all promised him that this desire of his would soon be realized.

Perhaps they would have called it realized by that crash of trains in
the night, which he and his wife hardly heard before their fine,
restless bodies were bereft of life.

So one day, when Lilla was six years old, the drawing-room suddenly
blossomed with white roses. Next morning the orphan was taken away by
Aunt Althea Balbian to another house, on lower Fifth Avenue.

CHAPTER II

Miss Balbian's house provided an appropriate setting for its pale,
aristocratic, chastely fervent owner. But its sedate, antiquated,
brick exterior--unaltered since the presidency of Andrew
Jackson--afforded hardly a hint of the conservative beauty that
pervaded it.

Here the glitter of old chand