The use of such men as Ault in the social structure is very doubtful, as doubtful as that of a summer tempest or local cyclone, which it is said clears the air and removes rubbish, but is a scourge that involves the innocent as often as the guilty.  It is popularly supposed that the disintegration and distribution of a great fortune, especially if it has been accumulated by doubtful methods, is a benefit to mankind.  Mr. Ault may have shared this impression, but it is unlikely that he philosophized on the subject.  No one, except perhaps his own family, had ever discovered that he had any sensibilities that could be appealed to, and, if he had known the ideas beginning to take shape in the mind of the millionaire heiress in regard to this fortune, he would have approved or comprehended them as little as did her mother.

Evelyn had lived hitherto with little comprehension of her peculiar position.  That the world went well with her, and that no obstacle was opposed to the gratification of her reasonable desires, or to her impulses of charity and pity, was about all she knew of her power.  But she was now eighteen and about to appear in the world.  Her mother, therefore, had been enlightening her in regard to her expectations and the career that lay open to her.  And Carmen thought the girl a little perverse, in that this prospect, instead of exciting her worldly ambition, seemed to affect her only seriously as a matter of responsibility.

In their talks Mrs. Mavick was in fact becoming acquainted with the mind of her daughter, and learning, somewhat to her chagrin, the limitations of her education produced by the policy of isolation.

To her dismay, she found that the girl did not care much for the things that she herself cared most for.  The whole world of society, its strifes, ambitions, triumphs, defeats, rewards, did not seem to Evelyn so real or so important as that world in which she had lived with her governess and her tutors.  And, worse than this, the estimate she placed upon the values of material things was shockingly inadequate to her position.

That her father was a very great man was one of the earliest things Evelyn began to know, exterior to herself.  This was impressed upon her by the deference paid to him not only at home but wherever they went, and by the deference shown to her as his daughter.  And she was proud of this.  He was not one of the great men whose careers she was familiar with in literature, not a general or a statesman or an orator or a scientist or a poet or a philanthropist she never thought of him in connection with these heroes of her imagination—­but he was certainly a great power in the world.  And she had for him a profound admiration, which might have become affection if Mavick had ever taken the pains to interest himself in the child’s affairs.  Her mother she loved, and believed there could be no one in the world more sweet and graceful and attractive, and as she grew