; then she had a good cry over "the perfectness of the
Percivals," and issued invitations to a masked ball.

"That ball was full of significance, Ruth," she told me afterwards with
her most whimsically knowing look. "It was bristling with it. But nobody
thought of it except a certain little goose I know named Sara Cox
Osborne."

Jack Whitehouse and Pet Winterbotham are married. They had the most
beautiful wedding I ever saw; but it was like watching the babes in the
wood, for they are _such_ a young-looking pair.

I understand better now what Pet meant when she talked about Jack's
appearance so much. I think he expressed to her the idea of perpetual
youth and eternal spring-time. To me, too, it seems as if he ought always
to be yachting in blue and white, or lying at full length on the grass at
some girl's feet. And Pet herself makes an admirable companion-piece.
When I see her in a misty white ball-dress, with one man bringing her an
ice and another holding her flowers and a third bearing her filmy wraps, I
feel that things are quite as they should be. Some people seem to be born
for fair weather and smooth sailing.

It is too soon to judge them finally. Norris Whitehouse's nephew will
outgrow the ball-room, and Pet will find in Louise an incentive to grow
womanly.

The Asburys have built a fine house since Alice's father died, and go
about a great deal, but seldom together. Asbury lives at the club, and
Alice has her mother with her. Alice has embraced Theosophy and spells her
name "Alys." She always is interested in something new and advanced, and
whenever I meet her I am prepared to go into ecstasies over a plan to save
men's souls by electricity, or something equally speedy in the moral line.
She is daft on spiritual rapid transit.

She does these things because she is a disappointed, clever, ambitious
woman, who would have made a noble character if she had been surrounded
by right influences.

What would have been the result if Alice had taken as her creed: "The
situation that has not its duty, its ideals, was never yet occupied by
man. Yes, here in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual,
wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out
therefrom, and working, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself; thy
condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same ideal out of; what
matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form thou give
it be heroic, be