Her hard, bright eyes grew suddenly wistful, and she looked at Laura as if she would pierce through the enveloping flesh to the soul within.  Of all the people she had ever known Laura was the only one, she had sometimes declared, who had never lied to her.  The world had lied to her, Kemper had lied to her, Perry had lied to her more than all; and she had come at last to feel, almost without explaining it to herself, that the truth was in Laura as in some obscure, mystic sense the sacrament was in the bread and wine upon the altar.  Though she herself was quite content to slip away from her ideals, she felt that to believe in somebody was as necessary to her life as the bread she ate.  It made no difference that she should number among the profane multitude who found their way back to the fleshpots, but her heart demanded that her friend should remain constant to the prophetic vision and the promised land.  Laura was not only the woman whom she loved, she had become to her at last almost a vicarious worship.  What she couldn’t believe Laura believed in her stead; where she was powerless even to be good, Laura became not only good but noble.  And through all her friendship, from that first day at school to the present moment, she remembered now that no hint of jealousy had ever looked at her from Laura’s eyes.  “A thrush could hardly borrow the plumage of a paroquet,” Trent had said; and the brilliant loveliness which had disturbed the peace of other women she had known, had produced in Laura only an increasing delight, a more fervent rapture.  As she looked on the delicate, poetic face of the woman before her, she found herself asking, almost in terror, if it were possible that her friend was not only reconciled but positively enamoured of the world?  Had Laura, also, entered into a rivalry which would be as relentless and more futile than her own?  Would she, too, waste her life in an effort to give substance to a shadow and to render permanent the most impermanent of earthly things?  But the question came and went so abruptly that the minute afterward she had entirely forgotten the passage of it through her mind.

“What a bore of a summer I shall have,” she observed lightly, with one of those swift changes of subject so characteristic of her restless temperament.  “The doctor has ordered me back to camp in the Adirondacks, and unless Arnold and yourself take pity on me heaven knows whether I’ll be any better than a fungus by the autumn.”

She was arranging her veil before the mirror as she spoke, and she paused now to survey with a dissatisfied frown one of the large black spots which had settled across her nose.  “I told Camille I couldn’t stand dots like these,” she remarked with an equally irrelevant flash of irritation.

“Of course I’ll come for July if you ask me,” replied Laura, ignoring the question of the veil for the sake of the more important issue, “I can’t answer for Arnold, but I think it’s rather what he’s looking forward to.”