Religion, perhaps, might have helped her; but it was characteristic of her generation that she should give religion hardly a thought as a possible solution of the problem of life.  She wanted substance, facts, experience; she wanted to examine, to analyze, to discover; and it was just here that religion hopelessly failed her as a guide.  Faith she had had in her cradle—­faith in life, faith in love, faith in herself; and it was faith that had brought her to this bleak disenchantment of spirit.  No, she wanted knowledge now, not faith; she wanted truth, not illusion.

“Well, you never can tell about a thing like that,” Miss Polly was saying in her sprightly way, quite as if she were discussing the pattern of a dress or the stitching of a seam.  “It was feelin’, I reckon, and feelin’ is one of the things nobody can count on.  But you did mighty well, even if you didn’t marry Arthur.  I saw Mr. George downtown yesterday, when I went around to Stern’s to match the edging for a baby dress, and I thought to myself I’d seldom seen a handsomer piece of flesh than he was.  He was walkin’ along up Fifth Avenue with Florrie Spencer—­I’ll always call her Florrie Spencer I don’t care how many times she marries—­and everybody in the street turned right plumb round to look at ’em.  She’s prettier than she ever was, ain’t she?  And such a fit as her dress was!  One of them trailin’ black things that fit as tight as wax over the hips and flares out all round the feet.  She was holdin’ up her skirts to show her feet, I reckon, and her collar was so high behind her ears, she could hardly turn her head to look at Mr. George.  But I never saw anybody with more style—­no, not if it was that Mrs. Pletheridge who is everlastingly in the Sunday papers.  I declare Florrie’s waist didn’t look much bigger round than the leg of that table—­honestly it didn’t—­and her hat was perched on a bandeau so high that you could see the new sort of way she’d gone and had her hair crimped—­they call it Marcellin’ up here, don’t they?”

“Was she with George?” asked Gabriella indifferently.

“They were goin’ to some restaurant or another for tea, I reckon, and they certainly were a fine-lookin’ pair.  I wish you could have seen ’em.  Not that you wouldn’t have been a match for ’em,” she added consolingly.  “You and Mr. George look mighty well when you’re together.  You’re just on a level, and if you could manage to tighten yo’ corset a little mite at the waist, and hold yo’self with that bend out at the back the way Florrie does, you’d have pretty near as fine a figure as she has.  Ain’t it funny,” she added irrelevantly, “but I was just studyin’ last night about the way yo’ ma used to say that all yo’ folks married badly.  I reckon she got that idea along of yo’ pa’s kin.  You don’t recollect much about ’em, but one of yo’ pa’s brothers married a woman who went clean deranged inside of a year and tried to kill him.  Then there was yo’ Cousin Nelly Harrison—­she