Maude looked at this strange woman in amazement.  She was speaking fast and hotly, like one whose bitter thoughts have been long penned up for want of a suitable listener.

’Remember the women who have been less fortunate than you.  Remember the thousands who are starving, dying, for want of love, and no love comes their way; whose hearts yearn and faint for that which Nature owes them, but Nature never pays her debt.  Remember the plain women.  Remember the lonely women.  Above all, remember your unfortunate sisters; they, the most womanly of all, who have been ruined by their own kindliness and trust and loving weakness.  It is that family selfishness which turns every house in the land into a fort to be held against these poor wanderers.  They make them evil, and then they revile the very evil which they have made.  When I look back—­’

She stopped with a sudden sob.  Her forearm fell upon the mantelpiece, and her forehead upon her forearm.  In an instant Maude was by her side, the tears running down her cheeks, for the sight of grief was always grief to her, and her nerves were weakened by this singular interview.

‘Dear Mrs. Wright, don’t cry!’ she whispered, and her little white hand passed in a soothing, hesitating gesture over the coil of rich chestnut hair.  ’Don’t cry!  I am afraid you have suffered.  Oh, how I wish I could help you!  Do tell me how I can help you.’

But Violet’s occasional fits of weakness were never of a very long duration.  She dashed her hand impatiently across her eyes, straightened her tall figure, and laughed as she glanced at herself in the mirror.

’Madame Celandine would be surprised if she could see how I have treated one of her masterpieces,’ said she, as she straightened her crushed hat, and arranged her hair with those quick little deft pats of the palm with which women can accomplish so much in so short a time.  Rumpled finery sets the hands of every woman within sight of it fidgeting, so Maude joined in at the patting and curling and forgot all about her tears.

‘There, that will have to do,’ said Violet at last.  ’I am so sorry to have made such a fool of myself.  I don’t err upon the sentimental side as a rule.  I suppose it is about time that I thought of catching my train for town.  I have a theatre engagement which I must not miss.’

‘How strange it is!’ said Maude, looking at her own pretty tear-marked face in the mirror.  ’You have only been here a few minutes, as time goes, and yet I feel that in some things I am more intimate with you than with any woman I have ever met.  How can it be?  What bond can there be to draw us together like this?  And it is the more extraordinary, because I felt that you disliked me when you entered the room, and I am sure that you won’t be offended if I say that when you had been here a little I thought that I disliked you.  But I don’t.  On the contrary, I wish you could come every day.  And I want to come and see you also when I am in town.’