may be
merely physical--I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But
in myself it seems different--it seems to go to the roots of the world.
You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me
over the ugly details--the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical
horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust
remains. Oh, Effie, I don't want to be a ministering angel any more--I
want to be uncertain, coy and hard to please. I want something dazzling
and unaccountable to happen to me--something new and unlived and
indescribable!"

She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and
flinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished
floor.

"Well, then," murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, "I can't see
why in the world you won't go to the Gaines's garden-party!" And caught
in the whirlwind of her friend's incomprehensible mirth, she still
persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: "If you'll only let me
lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you'll look smarter than anybody
there...."

* * * * *

Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way
to fulfill Mrs. Dressel's prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could
no more help reflecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the
subtler influence of word and look; and her face and figure were so new
to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced
the effect of a young girl in her first "good" frock. In Mrs. Dressel's
festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she
was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its
petals.

Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential
intimacy with the mother she had lost, had produced in her the quaint
habit of half-loud soliloquy. "Fine feathers, Justine!" she laughed back
at her laughing image. "You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes.
But slip back into your own plumage, and you'll be no more than a little
brown bird without a song!"

The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth
became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty
and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her
mother's face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But
those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years
follo