aid, the air of a tragic actress.
Her dark hair, with its soft waves about the forehead, her brilliant
eyes, and the delicate poetic charm of her figure, borrowed from the
costly furs a distinction which Gerty felt to be less that of style than
of personality.

"He will like me in this," she thought; and then remembering the ermine
wrap, which was becoming also, she wondered if another woman would buy
it, if Kemper would see it at the opera, and if he would, perhaps,
admire it again as he had done that day.

"If he does I shall regret these though they were so much more costly,"
she concluded, "and my whole pleasure in them may be destroyed by a
chance remark which he will let fall." She understood, all at once, the
relentless tyranny which clothes might acquire--the jealousy, the
extravagance, the feverish emulation, and the dislike which one woman
might feel for another who wore a better gown. "Yet if I give my whole
life to it there will always be someone who is richer, who is better
dressed and more beautiful than I," she thought. "Though my
individuality wins to-day, to-morrow I shall meet a woman beside whom I
shall be utterly extinguished. And there is no escape from this; it is
inevitable and must happen." A shiver of disgust went through her, and
it seemed to her that she saw her life as plainly as if the glass before
her revealed her whole future and not merely her figure in the sable
coat. She shrank from her destiny, and yet she knew that in spite of
herself, she must still follow it; she longed for her old freedom of
spirit, and instead she struggled helplessly in the net which her own
temperament cast about her. "Is it possible that I can ever enter into
this warfare which I have always despised?" she asked, "into this
conflict of self against self, of vanity against vanity? Shall I, like
Gerty, grow to fear and to hate other women in my foolish effort to keep
alive a passion which I know to be worthless? Shall I even come in the
end to feel terror and suspicion in my love for Gerty?" But this last
thought was so terrible to her that she lacked the courage with which to
face it, and so she put it now resolutely aside as she had learned to
put aside at will all the disturbing questions which her conscience
asked.

"I know that you are over head and ears in it all," Gerty was saying,
"and I shouldn't have dropped in if I hadn't just been called to the
telephone by Arnold. He was, of course, rushing off to