al decay.
It is undeniable that Grace seemed for a time, to have softened to, a
certain degree of self-indulgence. During the brief opera season the
first winter after her return, she spent a week in Boston; she often
came to the city, and went to the theatres and the exhibitions of
pictures. It was for some time Miss Gleason's opinion that these
escapades were the struggles of a magnanimous nature, unequally mated,
to forget itself. When they met she indulged the habit of regarding Mrs.
Libby with eyes of latent pity, till one day she heard something that
gave her more relief than she could ever have hoped for. This was
the fact, perfectly ascertained by some summer sojourners in the
neighborhood; that Mrs. Libby was turning her professional training to
account by treating the sick children among her husband's operatives.

In the fall Miss Gleason saw her heroine at an exhibition of
pictures. She rushed across the main hall of the Museum to greet her.
"Congratulate you!" she deeply whispered, "on realizing your dream! Now
you are happy, now you can be at peace!"

"Happy? At peace?"

"In the good work you have taken up. Oh, nothing, under Gawd, is lost!"
she exclaimed, getting ready to run away, and speaking with her face
turned over her shoulder towards Mrs. Libby.

"Dream? Good work? What do you mean?"

"Those factory children!"

"Oh!" said Mrs. Libby coldly, "that was my husband's idea."

"Your husband's!" cried Miss Gleason, facing about again, and trying to
let a whole history of suddenly relieved anxiety speak in her eyes. "How
happy you make me! Do let me thank you!"

In the effort to shake hands with Mrs. Libby she knocked the catalogue
out of her hold, and vanished in the crowd without knowing it. Some
gentleman picked it up, and gave it to her again, with a bow of
burlesque devotion.

Mrs. Libby flushed tenderly. "I might have known it would be you,
Walter. Where did you spring from?"

"I've been here ever since you came."

"What in the world doing?"

"Oh, enjoying myself."

"Looking at the pictures?"

"Watching you walk round:'

"I thought you couldn't be enjoying the pictures," she said simply. "I'm
not."

She was not happy, indeed, in any of the aesthetic dissipations into
which she had plunged, and it was doubtless from a shrewder knowledge
of her nature than she had herself that her husband had proposed
this active usefulness, which she once intended under such different
conditions.