It was in this little house that the reduced family stowed itself after the downfall.  The little house, had it been sentient, would have been astonished at the entrance into it of the furniture and the remnants of luxurious living that Mrs. Mavick was persuaded belonged to her personally.  These reminders of former days were, after all, a mockery in the narrow quarters and the pinched economy of the bankrupt.  Yet they were, for a time useful in preserving to Mrs. Mavick a measure of self-respect, her self-respect having always been based upon what she had and not what she was.  In truth, the change of lot was harder for Mrs. Mavick than for Evelyn, since the world in which the latter lived had not been destroyed.  She still had her books, she still had a great love in her heart, and hope, almost now a sure hope, that her love would blossom into a great happiness.

But where was Philip?  In all this time why did he make no sign?  At moments a great fear came over her.  She was so ignorant of life.  Could he know what misery she was in, the daily witness of her father’s broken condition, of her mother’s uncertain temper?

XXVI

Is justice done in this world only by a succession of injustices?  Is there any law that a wrong must right a wrong?  Did it rebuke the means by which the vast fortune of Henderson was accumulated, that it was defeated of any good use by the fraud of his wife?  Was her action punished by the same unscrupulous tactics of the Street that originally made the fortune?  And Ault?  Would a stronger pirate arise in time to despoil him, and so act as the Nemesis of all violation of the law of honest relations between men?

The comfort is, in all this struggle of the evil powers, masked as justice, that the Almighty Ruler of the world does not forget his own, and shows them a smiling face in the midst of disaster.  There is no mystery in this.  For the noble part in man cannot be touched in its integrity by such vulgar disasters as we are considering.  In those days when Evelyn saw dissolving about her the material splendors of her old life, while the Golden House was being dismantled, and she was taking sad leave of the scenes of her girlhood, so vivid with memory of affection and of intellectual activity, they seemed only the shell, the casting-off of which gave her freedom.  The sun never shone brighter, there was never such singing in her heart, as on the morning when she was free to go to Mrs. Van Cortlandt’s and throw herself into the arms of her dear governess and talk of Philip.

Why not?  Perhaps she had not that kind of maidenly shyness, sometimes called conventional propriety, sometimes described as ‘mauvaise honte’ which a woman of the world would have shown.  The impulses of her heart followed as direct lines as the reasoning of her brain.  Was it due to her peculiar education, education only in the noblest ideas of the race, that she should be a sort of reversion, in our complicated life, to the type of woman in the old societies (we like to believe there was such a type as the poets love, the Nausicaas), who were single-minded, as frank to avow affection as opinion?