Hiram did not need to inquire how little that meant.  He knew that, when anyone Ellen Ranger loved was ill, she would permit no help in the nursing, neither by day nor by night.  He relapsed into his brooding over the problem which was his sad companion each conscious moment, now that the warning “Put your house in order” had been so sternly emphasized.

The day Dr. Schulze let them bring him down to the first floor, Mrs. Hastings—­“Mrs. Fred,” to distinguish her from “Mrs. Val”—­happened to call.  Mrs. Ranger did not like her for two reasons—­first, she had married her favorite cousin, Alfred Hastings, and had been the “ruination” of him; second, she had a way of running on and on to everyone and anyone about the most intimate family affairs, and close-mouthed Ellen Ranger thought this the quintessence of indiscretion and vulgarity.  But Hiram liked her, was amused by her always interesting and at times witty thrusts at the various members of her family, including herself.  So, Mrs. Ranger, clutching at anything that might lighten the gloom thick and black upon him, let her in and left them alone together.  With so much to do, she took advantage of every moment which she could conscientiously spend out of his presence.

At sight of Henrietta, Hiram’s face brightened; and well it might.  In old-fashioned Saint X it was the custom for a married woman to “settle down” as soon as she returned from her honeymoon—­to abandon all thoughts, pretensions, efforts toward an attractive exterior, and to become a “settled” woman, “settled” meaning purified of the last grain of the vanity of trying to please the eye or ear of the male.  And conversation with any man, other than her husband—­and even with him, if a woman were soundly virtuous, through and through—­must be as clean shorn of allurement as a Quaker meetinghouse.  Mrs. Fred had defied this ancient and sacred tradition of the “settled” woman.  She had kept her looks; she frankly delighted in the admiration of men.  And the fact that the most captious old maid in Saint X could not find a flaw in her character as a faithful wife, aggravated the offending.  For, did not her devotion to her husband make dangerous her example of frivolity retained and flaunted, as a pure private life in an infidel made his heresies plausible and insidious?  At “almost” forty, Mrs. Hastings looked “about” thirty and acted as if she were a girl or a widow.  Each group of gods seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it.  Saint X’s set of gods of conventionality doubtless seems ridiculous to those who knock the dust before some other set; but Saint X cannot be blamed for having a sober face before its own altars, and reserving its jeers and pitying smiles for deities of conventionality in high dread and awe elsewhere.  And if Mrs. Fred had not been “one of the Fuller heirs,” Saint X would have made her feel its displeasure, instead of merely gossiping and threatening.

“I’m going the round of the invalids to-day,” began Henrietta, after she had got through the formula of sick-room conversation.  “I’ve just come from old John Skeffington.  I found all the family in the depths.  He fooled ’em again last night.”