enefit of the Female
Waifs' Refuge. She is to dance."

"Who? Mrs. Brown?"

Edith paid no attention to this impertinence. "They are to make an
artificial evening at eleven o'clock in the morning."

"They must have got hold of Mavick's notion that this dance is religious
in its origin. Do you, know if the exercises will open with prayer?"

"Nonsense, Jack. You know I don't intend to go. I shall send a small
check."

"Well, draw it mild. But isn't this what I'm accused of doing--shirking
my duty of personal service by a contribution?"

"Perhaps. But you didn't have any of that shirking feeling last night,
did you?"

Jack laughed, and ran round to give the only reply possible to such
a gibe. These breakfast interludes had not lost piquancy in all these
months. "I'm half a mind to go to this thing. I would, if it didn't
break up my day so."

"As for instance?"

"Well, this morning I have to go up to the riding-school to see a
horse--Storm; I want to try him. And then I have to go down to Twist's
and see a lot of Japanese drawings he's got over. Do you know that
the birds and other animals those beggars have been drawing, which
we thought were caricatures, are the real thing? They have eyes sharp
enough to see things in motion--flying birds and moving horses which
we never caught till we put the camera on them. Awfully curious. Then I
shall step into the club a minute, and--"

"Be in at lunch? Bess is coming."

"Don't wait lunch. I've a lot to do."

Edith followed him with her eyes, a little wistfully; she heard the
outer door close, and still sat at the table, turning over the pile of
notes at her plate, and thinking of many things--things that it began
to dawn upon her mind could not be done, and things of immediate urgency
that must be done. Life did not seem quite such a simple problem to her
as it had looked a year ago. That there is nothing like experiment to
clear the vision is the general idea, but oftener it is experience
that perplexes. Indeed, Edith was thinking that some things seemed much
easier to her before she had tried them.

As she sat at the table with a faultless morning-gown, with a bunch of
English violets in her bosom, an artist could have desired no better
subject. Many people thought her eyes her best feature; they were large
brown eyes, yet not always brown, green at times, liquid, but never
uncertain, apt to have a smile in them, yet their chief appealing
characteristic was trustfu