“Honestly.  I’d feel like a jailer, if you didn’t go.”

“What’ll you do in the evenings?”

“Work later, dine later, go to bed and get up earlier.”

“Work—­always work,” she said.  She sighed, not wholly insincerely.  “I wish I weren’t so idle and aimless.  If I were the woman I ought to be—­”

“None of that—­none of that!” he cried, in mock sternness.

“I ought to be interested in your work.”

“Why, I thought you were!” he exclaimed, in smiling astonishment.

“Oh, of course, in a way—­in an ‘entertainment’ sort of way.  I like to hear you talk about it—­who wouldn’t?  But I don’t give the kind of interest I should—­the interest that thinks and suggests and stimulates.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” said Dory.  “The ‘helpful’ sort of people are usually a nuisance.”

But she knew the truth, though passion might still be veiling it from him.  Life, before her father’s will forced an abrupt change, had been to her a showman, submitting his exhibits for her gracious approval, shifting them as soon as she looked as if she were about to be bored; and the change had come before she had lived long enough to exhaust and weary of the few things he has for the well-paying passive spectator, but not before she had formed the habit of making only the passive spectator’s slight mental exertion.

“Dory is so generous,” she thought, with the not acutely painful kind of remorse we lay upon the penitential altar for our own shortcomings, “that he doesn’t realize how I’m shirking and letting him do all the pulling.”  And to him she said, “If you could have seen into my mind while Janet was here, you’d give me up as hopeless.”

Dory laughed.  “I had a glimpse of it just now—­when you didn’t like it because I couldn’t see my way clear to taking certain people so seriously as you think they deserve.”

“But you are prejudiced on that subject,” she maintained.

“And ever shall be,” admitted he, so good-humoredly that she could not but respond.  “It’s impossible for me to forget that every luxurious idler means scores who have to work long hours for almost nothing in order that he may be of no use to the world or to himself.”

“You’d have the whole race on a dead level,” said Adelaide.

“Of material prosperity—­yes,” replied Dory.  “A high dead level.  I’d abolish the coarse, brutal contrasts between waste and want.  Then there’d be a chance for the really interesting contrasts—­the infinite varieties of thought and taste and character and individuality.”

“I see,” said Adelaide, as if struck by a new idea.  “You’d have the contrasts, differences among flowers, not merely between flower and weed.  You’d abolish the weeds.”

“Root and stalk,” answered Dory, admiring her way of putting it.  “My objection to these aristocratic ideals is that they are so vulgar—­and so dishonest.  Is that prejudice?”