nd self-respect had always sufficed to keep the
most ungovernable passions at bay. The experience of the guardian's
widow having been precisely similar, and the deplorable precedent of
Laura's career being present to all their minds, none of these ladies
felt any obligation to intervene farther in Sophy's affairs; and she was
accordingly left to her own resources.

A schoolmate from the Rocky Mountains, who was taking her father and
mother to Europe, had suggested Sophy's accompanying them, and "going
round" with her while her progenitors, in the care of the courier,
nursed their ailments at a fashionable bath. Darrow gathered that the
"going round" with Mamie Hoke was a varied and diverting process; but
this relatively brilliant phase of Sophy's career was cut short by
the elopement of the inconsiderate Mamie with a "matinee idol" who had
followed her from New York, and by the precipitate return of her parents
to negotiate for the repurchase of their child.

It was then--after an interval of repose with compassionate but
impecunious American friends in Paris--that Miss Viner had been drawn
into the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett's career. The impecunious
compatriots had found Mrs. Murrett for her, and it was partly on
their account (because they were such dears, and so unconscious, poor
confiding things, of what they were letting her in for) that Sophy had
stuck it out so long in the dreadful house in Chelsea. The Farlows, she
explained to Darrow, were the best friends she had ever had (and the
only ones who had ever "been decent" about Laura, whom they had seen
once, and intensely admired); but even after twenty years of Paris they
were the most incorrigibly inexperienced angels, and quite persuaded
that Mrs. Murrett was a woman of great intellectual eminence, and the
house at Chelsea "the last of the salons"--Darrow knew what she meant?
And she hadn't liked to undeceive them, knowing that to do so would be
virtually to throw herself back on their hands, and feeling, moreover,
after her previous experiences, the urgent need of gaining, at any cost,
a name for stability; besides which--she threw it off with a slight
laugh--no other chance, in all these years, had happened to come to her.

She had brushed in this outline of her career with light rapid strokes,
and in a tone of fatalism oddly untinged by bitterness. Darrow perceived
that she classified people according to their greater or less "luck" in
life, but she a