this was the flowering of her later
life.

"My God!" she said to Lydia one night, before getting up to dress for a
lecture, "I'm pretty nearly--what is it they call it--all in? I may drop
dead. I shouldn't wonder if I did. If I do, you take Jeff into the joke.
Nobody'd appreciate it more than Jeff."

"You don't think the men like him the less for it?" said Lydia.

"Oh, God bless me, no. They adore him. They think he's a god because he
tells their folk tales and their stories. I give you my word, Lydia, I'd
no idea I knew so many things."

"What did you tell last night?" said Lydia.

"Oh, stories, stories, stories. To-night I may spice it up a little with
modern middle-Europe scandal. Dear souls! they love it."

"What does Jeff think they're listening to?" asked Lydia.

"The trusts, last time," said Madame Beattie. "My Holy Father! that's
what he thinks. The trusts!"

XXV

The colonel thrived, about this time, on that fallacious feeling, born
of hope eternal, that he was growing young. It is one of the
precautionary lies of nature, to keep us going, that, the instant we are
tinkered in any part, we ignore its merely being fitted up for shortened
use. Hope eternal tells us how much stronger it is than it was before.
If you rub unguent into your scanty hair you can feel it grow, as a poet
hears the grass. A nostrum on your toil-hardened hands brings back, to
keen anticipation, the skin of youth. All mankind is prepared to a
perfect degree of sensitiveness for response to the quack doctor's art.
We believe so fast that he need hardly do more than open his mouth to
cry his wares. The colonel, doing a good day's work and getting tired
enough to sleep at night, felt, on waking, as if life were to last the
measure of his extremest appetite. The household went on wings, so
clever and silent was Anne in administration and so efficient Mary
Nellen. Only Anne was troubled in her soul because Lydia would go
slipping away for these secret sessions with Madame Beattie. She even
proposed going with her once or twice, but Lydia said she had put it off
for that night; and next time she slipped away more cleverly. Once in
these calls Lydia met Esther at the head of the stairs, and they said
"How do you do?" in an uncomfortable way, Esther with reproving dignity
and Lydia in a bravado that looked like insolence. And then Esther sent
for Alston Choate, and in the evening he came.

Esther was a pathetic pale creature, as