ve! And I am going to love it with the selfless love that
comes from God, and destroys error and the false beliefs that become
externalized in the human consciousness as sickness, failure, old
age, and death! Love, love, love--it is mankind's greatest need! Why,
if the preachers only knew, the very heart and soul of Christianity is
love! It is love that casts out fear; and fear is at the bottom of all
sickness, for fear leads to belief in other gods than the one Father
of Christ Jesus! Christianity is aflame with love! Oh, God--take me
out into the world, and let me show it what love can do!"

And the divine ear heard the call of this beautiful disciple of the
Christ--aye, had heard it long before the solicitous, fluttering
little Madam Elwin decided that the strange girl's unevangelical views
were inimical to the best interests of her very select school. The
social ambitions of the wealthy Mrs. Hawley-Crowles threw wide the
portals of the world to Carmen, and she entered, wide-eyed and
wondering. Nor did she return until the deepest recesses of the human
mind had revealed to her their abysmal hideousness, their ghastly
emptiness of reality, and their woeful mesmeric deception.

CHAPTER 8

Mrs. James Hawley-Crowles, more keenly perceptive than her sister, had
seized upon Carmen with avidity bred of hope long deferred. The
scourge of years of fruitless social striving had rendered her
desperate, and she would have staged a ballet on her dining table,
with her own ample self as _premiere danseuse_, did the attraction but
promise recognition from the blase members of fashionable New York's
ultra-conservative set. From childhood she had looked eagerly forward
through the years with an eye single to such recognition as life's
desideratum. To this end she had bartered both youth and beauty with
calculated precision for the Hawley-Crowles money bags; only to weep
floods of angry tears when the bargain left her social status
unchanged, and herself tied to a decrepit old rounder, whose tarnished
name wholly neutralized the purchasing power of his ill-gotten gold.
Fortunately for the reputations of them both, her husband had the good
sense to depart this life ere the divorce proceedings which she had
long had in contemplation were instituted; whereupon the stricken
widow had him carefully incinerated and his ashes tenderly deposited
in a chaste urn in a mausoleum which her architect had taken oath cost
more than the sh