g line of
pleasure vehicles--society taking an airing in the chill November
afternoon.

"Poverty, ostracism," she thought. And should she marry rich? Of
course, if she could. And whom should she marry? The Lieutenant?
Never. He was really not masterful enough mentally, and he had
witnessed her discomfiture. And who, then? Oh, the long line of
sillies, light-weights, rakes, ne'er-do-wells, who, combined with
sober, prosperous, conventional, muddle-headed oofs, constituted
society. Here and there, at far jumps, was a real man, but would he be
interested in her if he knew the whole truth about her?

"Have you broken with Mr. Braxmar?" asked her mother, curiously,
nervously, hopefully, hopelessly.

"I haven't seen him since," replied Berenice, lying conservatively. "I
don't know whether I shall or not. I want to think." She arose. "But
don't you mind, mother. Only I wish we had some other way of living
besides being dependent on Mr. Cowperwood."

She walked into her boudoir, and before her mirror began to dress for a
dinner to which she had been invited. So it was Cowperwood's money
that had been sustaining them all during the last few years; and she
had been so liberal with his means--so proud, vain, boastful, superior.
And he had only fixed her with those inquiring, examining eyes. Why?
But she did not need to ask herself why. She knew now. What a game he
had been playing, and what a silly she had been not to see it. Did her
mother in any way suspect? She doubted it. This queer, paradoxical,
impossible world! The eyes of Cowperwood burned at her as she thought.

Chapter LIII

A Declaration of Love

For the first time in her life Berenice now pondered seriously what she
could do. She thought of marriage, but decided that instead of sending
for Braxmar or taking up some sickening chase of an individual even
less satisfactory it might be advisable to announce in a simple social
way to her friends that her mother had lost her money, and that she
herself was now compelled to take up some form of employment--the
teaching of dancing, perhaps, or the practice of it professionally.
She suggested this calmly to her mother one day. Mrs. Carter, who had
been long a parasite really, without any constructive monetary notions
of real import, was terrified. To think that she and "Bevy," her
wonderful daughter, and by reaction her son, should come to anything so
humdrum and prosaic as ordinary struggling