I can tell you, more women meditate suicide
from pure ennui than in any city on earth!"

Isabel was appalled by this outburst. The brilliant day seemed faded,
the bright faces were grinning masks. Then she experienced a powerful
rush of loyalty towards this stranded member of her own class, and
before she realized what she was saying, she had offered to send her to
Europe to finish the musical education begun in her promising youth.

"Don't be angry," she stammered, knowing the intense pride of the
impoverished American. "Why not? We are really related. I am quite
alone. My little fortune has almost doubled. I make much more than I can
spend. It would be quite shocking if I did not do something for some
one--there is Paula of course, but it is against my principle to do too
much for any woman with a husband. Do--please--"

Miss Montgomery, who had flushed deeply and averted her head, turned
suddenly with a smile and a light in her eyes that, with the color in
her cheeks, made her look young for a moment.

"That was just like you!" she exclaimed. "I remember in Rosewater, when
you were a little thing, you used to give away the clothes on your back,
and your toys never lasted a week; although you beat the children and
pulled them about by the hair when they didn't play to suit you. I saw
you on the street just after your return from Europe--you looked as if
you had wrapped yourself up in the pride of your nature--had found a
plane apart from common mortals. For that reason I did not remind you of
my existence. But I should have remembered that you had had trouble and
care enough to freeze any woman of your inheritances into a sort of
animated Revolutionary statue. But you are just the same old Isabel. It
makes me feel young again."

"And you will go?" asked Isabel, eagerly.

Miss Montgomery shook her head. "No," she said, sadly. "It is too late.
I am thirty-five. If you have made no place for yourself by that time in
America you belong by a sort of divine decree to the treadmill. And the
limberness has gone out of my fingers as out of my mind. Sometimes I
deluge my pillow; but I will confess to you that down deep there is a
consciousness of bluntness, and it makes me inconsistently satisfied to
be here in this land of climate and plenty, instead of in Boston or New
York, where both climatic and social conditions are so terribly stern
for the poor. After all, the word 'struggle' is a mere euphemism out
here, and I a