Adelaide pretended to herself to regard Henrietta as an energetic and stimulating person, though she knew that Henrietta’s energy, like her own, like that of most women of the sheltered, servant-attended class, was a mere blowing off of steam by an active but valveless engine of a mind.  But this pretense enabled her to justify herself for long mornings and afternoons at the Country Club with Henrietta.  They talked of activity, of accomplishing this and that and the other; they read fitfully at serious books; they planned novels and plays; they separated each day with a comfortable feeling that they had been usefully employed.  And each did learn much from the other; but, as each confirmed the other in the habitual mental vices of the women, and of an increasing number of the men, of our quite comfortable classes, the net result of their intercourse was pitifully poor, the poorer for their fond delusions that they were improving themselves.  They laughed at the “culture craze” which, raging westward, had seized upon all the women of Saint X with incomes, or with husbands or fathers to support them in idleness—­the craze for thinking, reading, and talking cloudily or muddily on cloudy or muddy subjects.  Henrietta and Adelaide jeered; yet they were themselves the victims of another, and, if possible, more poisonous, bacillus of the same sluggard family.

One morning Adelaide, in graceful ease in her favorite nook in the small northwest portico of the club house, was reading a most imposingly bound and illustrated work on Italian architecture written by a smatterer for smatterers.  She did a great deal of reading in this direction because it was also the direction of her talent, and so she could make herself think she was getting ready to join in Dory’s work when he returned.  She heard footsteps just round the corner, and looked up.  She and Ross Whitney were face to face.

There was no chance for evasion.  He, with heightened color, lifted his hat; she, with a nonchalance that made her proud of herself, smiled and stretched out her hand.  “Hello, Ross,” said she, languidly friendly.  “When did you come to town?” And she congratulated herself that her hair had gone up so well that morning and that her dress was one of her most becoming—­from Paris, from Paquin—­a year old, it is true, but later than the latest in Saint X and fashionable even for Sherry’s at lunch time.

Ross, the expert, got himself together and made cover without any seeming of scramble; but his not quite easy eyes betrayed him to her.  “About two hours ago,” replied he.

“Is Theresa with you?” She gazed tranquilly at him as she fired this center shot.  She admired the coolness with which he received it.

“No; she’s up at her father’s place—­on the lake shore,” he answered.  He, too, was looking particularly well, fresh yet experienced, and in dress a model, with his serge of a strange, beautiful shade of blue, his red tie and socks, and his ruby-set cuff-links.  “Mr. Howland is ill, and she’s nursing him.  I’m taking a few days off—­came down to try to sell father’s place for him.”