trived fashionable monsters, where human beings are constrained to
grow in the shape of flower-pots, so fashionable life contrives at
last to grow a woman who hates babies, and will risk her life to be
rid of the crowning glory of womanhood.

There was a time in Lillie's life, when she was sixteen years of age,
which was a turning-point with her, and decided that she should be the
heartless woman she was. If at that age, and at that time, she had
decided to marry the man she really loved, marriage might indeed have
proved to her a sacrament. It might have opened to her a door through
which she could have passed out from a career of selfish worldliness
into that gradual discipline of unselfishness which a true
love-marriage brings.

But she did not. The man was poor, and she was beautiful; her beauty
would buy wealth and worldly position, and so she cast him off. Yet
partly to gratify her own lingering feeling, and partly because she
could not wholly renounce what had once been hers, she kept up for
years with him just that illusive simulacrum which such women call
friendship; which, while constantly denying, constantly takes pains to
attract, and drains the heart of all possibility of loving another.

Harry Endicott was a young man of fine capabilities, sensitive,
interesting, handsome, full of generous impulses, whom a good woman
might easily have led to a full completeness. He was not really
Lillie's cousin, but the cousin of her mother; yet, under the name of
cousin, he had constant access and family intimacy.

This winter Harry Endicott suddenly returned to the fashionable
circles of New York,--returned from a successful career in India, with
an ample fortune. He was handsomer than ever, took stylish bachelor
lodgings, set up a most distracting turnout, and became a sort of
Marquis of Farintosh in fashionable circles. Was ever any thing so
lucky, or so unlucky, for our Lillie?--lucky, if life really does
run on the basis of French novels, and if all that is needed is the
sparkle and stimulus of new emotions; unlucky, nay, even gravely
terrible, if life really is established on a basis of moral
responsibility, and dogged by the fatal necessity that "whatsoever man
or woman soweth, that shall he or she also reap."

In the most critical hour of her youth, when love was sent to her
heart like an angel, to beguile her from selfishness, and make
self-denial easy, Lillie's pretty little right hand had sowed to the
wo