tta--or
in the filthy bed with old Mrs. Tucker. Absently she glanced
down at her foot, holding it out as if for inspection. She
saw Brent's look of amusement at her seeming vanity.

"I was looking to see if my shoes were leaky," she explained.

A subtle change came over his face. He understood instantly.

"Have you ever been--cold?" she asked, looking at him strangely.

"One cold February--cold and damp--I had no underclothes--and
no overcoat."

"And dirty beds--filthy rooms--filthy people?"

"A ten-cent lodging house with a tramp for bedfellow."

They were looking at each other, with the perfect understanding
and sympathy that can come only to two people of the same fiber
who have braved the same storms. Each glanced hastily away.

Her enthusiasm for doing the apartment was due full as much to
the fact that it gave her definitely directed occupation as to
its congeniality. That early training of hers from Aunt Fanny
Warham had made it forever impossible for her in any
circumstances to become the typical luxuriously sheltered
woman, whether legally or illegally kept--the lie-abed woman,
the woman who dresses only to go out and show off, the woman
who wastes her life in petty, piffling trifles--without
purpose, without order or system, without morals or personal
self-respect. She had never lost the systematic instinct--the
instinct to use time instead of wasting it--that Fanny Warham
had implanted in her during the years that determine
character. Not for a moment, even without distinctly definite
aim, was she in danger of the creeping paralysis that is
epidemic among the rich, enfeebling and slowing down mental
and physical activity. She had a regular life; she read, she
walked in the Bois; she made the best of each day. And when
this definite thing to accomplish offered, she did not have to
learn how to work before she could begin the work itself.

All this was nothing new to Gourdain. He was born and bred in
a country where intelligent discipline is the rule and the
lack of it the rare exception--among all classes--even among
the women of the well-to-do classes.

The finished apartment was a disappointment to Palmer. Its
effects were too quiet, too restrained. Within certain small
limits, those of the man of unusual intelligence but no marked
originality, he had excellent taste--or, perhaps, excellent
ability to recognize good taste. But in the large he yearned
for the grandiose. He loved t