for not the least important among the sacred “appearances” of conventionality is the “appearance” of good-heartedness; it is the graceful cloak for that icy selfishness which is as inevitable among the sheltered and pampered as sympathy and helpfulness are among those naked to the joys and sorrows of real life.  Adelaide was far from her friends, and she deliberately gave them every opportunity to abandon and to forget her without qualms or fears of “appearing” mean and snobbish.  There were two girls from whom she rather hoped for signs of real friendship.  She had sought them in the first place because they were “of the right sort,” but she had come to like them for themselves and she believed they liked her for herself.  And so they did; but their time was filled with the relentless routine of the fashionable life, and they had not a moment to spare for their own personal lives; besides, Adelaide wouldn’t have “fitted in” comfortably.  The men of their set would be shy of her now; the women would regard her as a waste of time.

Her beauty and her cleverness might have saved her, had she been of one of those “good families” whom fashionables the world over recognize, regardless of their wealth or poverty, because recognition of them gives an elegant plausibility to the pretense that Mammon is not the supreme god in the Olympus of aristocracy.  But—­who were the Rangers?  They might be “all right” in Saint X, but where was Saint X?  Certainly, not on any map in the geography of fashion.

So Adelaide, sore but too lethargic to suffer, drifted drearily along, feeling that if Dory Hargrave were not under the influence of that brilliant, vanished past of hers, even he would abandon her as had the rest, or, at least, wouldn’t care for her.  Not that she doubted his sincerity in the ideals he professed; but people deceived themselves so completely.  There was her own case; had she for an instant suspected how flimsily based was her own idea of herself and of her place in the world?—­the “world” meaning, of course, “the set.”  As is the rule in “sets,” her self-esteem’s sole foundation had been what she had, or, rather, what the family had, and now that that was gone, she held what was left cheap indeed—­and held herself the cheaper that she could feel thus.  At the outset, Arthur, after the familiar male fashion, was apparently the weaker of the two.  But when the test came, when the time for courageous words was succeeded by the time for deeds, the shrinking from action that, since the nation grew rich, has become part of the education of the women of the classes which shelter and coddle their women, caused Adelaide to seem feeble indeed beside her brother.  Also—­and this should never be forgotten in judging such a woman—­Arthur had the advantage of the man’s compulsion to act, while Adelaide had the disadvantage of being under no material necessity to act—­and what necessity but the material is there?