Adelaide’s eyes shifted.  Clearly Madelene’s keen, pretense-scattering gaze was not one to invite to inspect a matter which might not look at all well stripped of its envelopes of phrase and haze.  She wished she had not come; indeed, she had been half-wishing it during the whole three-quarters of an hour of watching and thinking on Madelene’s wonderful life, so crowded with interest, with achievement, with all that Hiram Ranger’s daughter called, and believed, “the real thing.”

“Nothing, nothing at all,” replied she to Madelene’s question.  “I just dropped in to annoy you with my idle self—­or, maybe, to please you.  You know we’re taught at church that a large part of the joy of the saved comes from watching the misery of the damned.”

But Madelene had the instinct of the physician born.  “She has something on her mind and wants me to help her,” she thought.  Aloud she said:  “I feel idle, myself.  We’ll sit about for an hour, and you’ll stay to dinner with Arthur and me—­we have it here to-day, as your mother is going out.  Afterwards I must do my round.”

A silence, with Adelaide wondering where Ross was and just when he would return.  Then Madelene went on:  “I’ve been trying to persuade your mother to give up the house, change it into a hospital.”

The impudence of it! Their house, their home; and this newcomer into the family—­a newcomer from nowhere—­trying to get it away from them!  “Mother said something about it,” said Adelaide frostily.  “But she didn’t say you had been at her.  I think she ought to be left alone in her old age.”

“The main thing is to keep her interested in life, don’t you think?” suggested Madelene, noting how Adelaide was holding herself in check, but disregarding it.  “Your mother’s a plain, natural person and never has felt at home in that big house.  Indeed, I don’t think any human being ever does feel at home in a big house.  There was a time when they fitted in with the order of things; but now they’ve become silly, it seems to me, except for public purposes.  When we all get sensible and go in for being somebody instead of for showing off, we’ll live in convenient, comfortable, really tasteful and individual houses and have big buildings only for general use.”

“I’m afraid the world will never grow up into your ideals, Madelene,” said Del with restrained irony.  “At least not in our day.”

“I’m in no hurry,” replied Madelene good-naturedly.  “The most satisfactory thing about common sense is that one can act on it without waiting for others to get round to it.  But we weren’t talking of those who would rather be ignorantly envied than intelligently happy.  We were talking of your mother.”

“Mother was content with her mode of life until you put these ‘advanced’ ideas into her head.”