course, her sisters. But healthy,
imaginative, ardent youth requires more than sisters,--more even than
feminine friends, of which Athalie had a few. What she needed, as all
girls need, were acquaintances and friends among men of her own age.

And she had none--that is, no friends. Which is the usual fate of any
business girl who keeps up such education and cultivation as she
possesses, and attempts to add to it and to improve her quality.

Because the men of her social and business level are vastly inferior
to the women,--inferior in manners, cultivation, intelligence,
quality--which seems almost to make their usually excellent morals
peculiarly offensive.

That was why Athalie knew loneliness. Doris, recently, had met a few
idle men of cultivated and fashionable antecedents. Catharine, that
very evening, was evidently going to meet a man of that sort for the
first time in her career.

As for Athalie, she had had no opportunity to meet any man she cared
to cultivate since she had last talked with C. Bailey, Jr., on the
platform of the Sixth Avenue Elevated;--and that was now nearly four
years ago.

* * * * *

Braiding up her hair she sat gazing at herself in the mirror while her
detached thoughts drifted almost anywhere--back to Spring Pond and
the Hotel Greensleeve, back to her mother, to the child cross-legged
on the floor,--back to her father, and how he sat there dead in his
leather chair;--back to the bar, and the red gleam of the stove, and a
boy and girl in earnest conversation there in the semi-darkness,
eating peach turnovers--

She turned her head, leisurely: the electric bell had sounded twice
before she realised that she ought to pull the wire which opened the
street door below.

So she got up, pulled the wire, and then sauntered out into the
sitting-room and set the door ajar, not worrying about her somewhat
intimate costume because it was too late for tradesmen, and there was
nobody else to call on her or on her sisters excepting other girls
known to them all.

The sitting-room seemed chilly. Half listening for the ascending
footsteps and the knocking, partly absorbed in other thoughts, she
seated herself and lay back in the dingy arm-chair, before the
radiator, elevating her dainty feet to the top of it and crossing
them.

A gale was now blowing outside; invisible rain, or more probably
sleet, pelted and swished across the curtained panes. Far away in the
cit