her philosophy was that of the modern, orthodox American, tinged by a somewhat commercialized Sunday school tradition of an earlier day, and highly approved by the censors of the movies.  The peculiar kind of abstinence once euphemistically known as “virtue,” particularly if it were combined with beauty, never failed of its reward.  Lise, in this sense, was indeed virtuous, and her mirror told her she was beautiful.  Almost anything could happen to such a lady:  any day she might be carried up into heaven by that modern chariot of fire, the motor car, driven by a celestial chauffeur.

One man’s meat being another’s poison, Lise absorbed from the movies an element by which her sister Janet was repelled.  A popular production known as “Leila of Hawtrey’s” contained her creed,—­Hawtrey’s being a glittering metropolitan restaurant where men of the world are wont to gather and discuss the stock market, and Leila a beautiful, blonde and orphaned waitress upon whom several of the fashionable frequenters had exercised seductive powers in vain.  They lay in wait for her at the side entrance, followed her, while one dissipated and desperate person, married, and said to move in the most exclusive circles, sent her an offer of a yearly income in five figures, the note being reproduced on the screen, and Leila pictured reading it in her frigid hall-bedroom.  There are complications; she is in debt, and the proprietor of Hawtrey’s has threatened to discharge her and in order that the magnitude of the temptation may be most effectively realized the vision appears of Leila herself, wrapped in furs, stepping out of a limousine and into an elevator lifting her to an apartment containing silk curtains, a Canet bed, a French maid, and a Pomeranian.  Virtue totters, but triumphs, being reinforced by two more visions the first of these portrays Leila, prematurely old, dragging herself along pavements under the metallic Broadway lights accosting gentlemen in evening dress; and the second reveals her in the country, kneeling beside a dying mother’s bed, giving her promise to remain true to the Christian teachings of her childhood.

And virtue is rewarded, lavishly, as virtue should be, in dollars and cents, in stocks and bonds, in pearls and diamonds.  Popular fancy takes kindly to rough but honest westerners who have begun life in flannel shirts, who have struck gold and come to New York with a fortune but despising effeteness; such a one, tanned by the mountain sun, embarrassed in raiment supplied by a Fifth Avenue tailor, takes a table one evening at Hawtrey’s and of course falls desperately in love.  He means marriage from the first, and his faith in Leila is great enough to survive what appears to be an almost total eclipse of her virtue.  Through the machinations of the influential villain, and lured by the false pretence that one of her girl friends is ill, she is enticed into a mysterious house of a sinister elegance, and apparently irretrievably compromised.  The westerner