as
scarcely audible.

Selma's frank and generous--and confiding--self-sacrifice aroused no
response in Jane Hastings. For the first time in her life she was
knowing what it meant to hate.

"And I've got to warn you," Selma went on, "that I am going to do
whatever I can to keep you from hindering him. Not because I love him,
but because I owe it to the cause. He belongs to it, and I must help
him be single-hearted for it. You could only be a bad influence in his
life. I think you would like to be a sincere woman; but you can't.
Your class is too strong for you. So--it would be wrong for Victor Dorn
to love and to marry you. I think he realizes it and is struggling to
be true to himself. I intend to help him, if I can."

Jane smiled cruelly. "What hypocrisy!" she said, and turned and walked
away.

VIII

In America we have been bringing up our women like men, and treating
them like children. They have active minds with nothing to act upon.
Thus they are driven to think chiefly about themselves. With Jane
Hastings, self-centering took the form of self-analysis most of the
time. She was intensely interested in what she regarded as the new
development of her character. This definite and apparently final
decision for the narrow and the ungenerous. In fact, it was no new
development, but simply a revelation to herself of her own real
character. She was seeing at last the genuine Jane Hastings,
inevitable product of a certain heredity in a certain environment. The
high thinking and talking, the idealistic aspiration were pose and
pretense. Jane Hastings was a selfish, self-absorbed person, ready to
do almost any base thing to gain her ends, ready to hate to the
uttermost any one who stood between her and her object.

"I'm certainly not a lovely person--not a lovable person," thought she,
with that gentle tolerance wherewith we regard our ownselves, whether
in the dress of pretense or in the undress of deformed humanness.
"Still--I am what I am, and I've got to make the best of it."

As she thought of Selma's declaration of war she became less and less
disturbed about it. Selma neither would nor could do anything sly.
Whatever she attempted in the open would only turn Victor Dorn more
strongly toward herself. However, she must continue to try to see him,
must go to see him in a few days if she did not happen upon him in her
rides or walks. How poorly he would think of her if he knew the truth
about