something--had, in fact, led to marriage; while the philosophy could
lead to nothing, unless it were perhaps to another evening of the
same kind, because transcendental philosophers are mostly elderly men,
usually married, and, when engaged in business, somewhat apt to be
sleepy towards evening. Nevertheless Mrs. Lee did her best to turn her
study to practical use. She plunged into philanthropy, visited prisons,
inspected hospitals, read the literature of pauperism and crime,
saturated herself with the statistics of vice, until her mind had nearly
lost sight of virtue. At last it rose in rebellion against her, and
she came to the limit of her strength. This path, too, seemed to lead
nowhere. She declared that she had lost the sense of duty, and that, so
far as concerned her, all the paupers and criminals in New York might
henceforward rise in their majesty and manage every railway on the
continent. Why should she care? What was the city to her? She could
find nothing in it that seemed to demand salvation. What gave peculiar
sanctity to numbers? Why were a million people, who all resembled each
other, any way more interesting than one person? What aspiration could
she help to put into the mind of this great million-armed monster that
would make it worth her love or respect? Religion? A thousand powerful
churches were doing their best, and she could see no chance for a
new faith of which she was to be the inspired prophet. Ambition? High
popular ideals? Passion for whatever is lofty and pure? The very words
irritated her. Was she not herself devoured by ambition, and was she not
now eating her heart out because she could find no one object worth a
sacrifice?

Was it ambition--real ambition--or was it mere restlessness that
made Mrs. Lightfoot Lee so bitter against New York and Philadelphia,
Baltimore and Boston, American life in general and all life in
particular? What did she want? Not social position, for she herself was
an eminently respectable Philadelphian by birth; her father a famous
clergyman; and her husband had been equally irreproachable, a descendant
of one branch of the Virginia Lees, which had drifted to New York in
search of fortune, and had found it, or enough of it to keep the young
man there. His widow had her own place in society which no one disputed.
Though not brighter than her neighbours, the world persisted in classing
her among clever women; she had wealth, or at least enough of it to give
her al