"Ouch!" cried Henrietta, making a wry face. And she devoted the rest of the afternoon to what she realized, at the parting, was the vain task of mollifying Del. She knew that thenceforth she and Adelaide would drift apart; and she was sorry, for she liked her—liked to talk with her, liked to go about with her. Adelaide's beauty attracted the men, and a male audience was essential to Henrietta's happiness; she found the conversation of women—the women she felt socially at ease with—tedious, and their rather problematic power of appreciation limited to what came from men. As she grew older, and less and less pleasing to the eye, the men showed more and more clearly how they had deceived themselves in thinking it was her brains that had made them like her. As Henrietta, with mournful cynicism, put it: "Men the world over care little about women beyond their physical charm. To realize it, look at us American women, who can do nothing toward furthering men's ambitions. We've only our physical charms to offer; we fall when we lose them. And so our old women and our homely women, except those that work or that have big houses and social power, have no life of their own, live on sufferance, alone or the slaves of their daughters or of some pretty young woman to whom they attach themselves."
The days dragged for Adelaide. "I'm afraid he'll write," said she—meaning that she hoped he would. Indeed, she felt that he had written, but had destroyed the letters. And she was right; almost all the time he could spare from his efforts to save his father from a sick but obstinately active man's bad judgment was given to writing to her—formal letters which he tore up as too formal, passionate letters which he destroyed as unwarranted and unwise, when he had not yet, face to face, in words, told her his love and drawn from her what he believed was in her heart. The days dragged; she kept away from Henrietta, from all "our set," lest they should read in her dejected countenance the truth, and more.
CHAPTER XXIV
DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES
Madelene's anteroom was full of poor people. They flocked to her, though she did not pauperize them by giving her services free. She had got the reputation of miraculous cures, the theory in the tenements being that her father had swindled his satanic "familiar" by teaching his daughter without price what he had had to pay for with his immortal soul. Adelaide refused the chair a sick-looking young artisan awkwardly pressed upon her. Leaning against the window seat, she tried to interest herself in her fellow-invalids. But she had not then the secret which unlocks the mystery of faces; she was still in the darkness in which most of us proudly strut away our lives, deriding as dreamers or cranks those who are in the light and see. With almost all of us the innate sympathies of race, which give even wolves and vultures the sense of fraternal companionship in the storm and stress of the struggle for existence, are deep overlaid with various kinds of that egotistic ignorance called class feeling. Adelaide felt sorry for "the poor," but she had yet to learn that she was of them, as poor in other and more important ways as they in money and drawing-room manners. Surfaces and the things of the surface obscured or distorted all the realities for her, as for most of us; and the fact that her intelligence laughed at and scorned her perverted instincts was of as little help to her as it is to most of us.
When Madelene was free she said to her sister-in-law, in mock seriousness, "Well, and what can I do for you!" as if she were another patient.
Adelaide's eyes shifted. Clearly Madelene's keen, pretense-scattering gaze was not one to invite to inspect a matter which might not look at all well stripped of its envelopes of phrase and haze. She wished she had not come; indeed, she had been half-wishing it during the whole three-quarters of an hour of watching and thinking on Madelene's wonderful life, so crowded with interest, with achievement, with all that Hiram Ranger's daughter called, and believed, "the real thing."
"Nothing, nothing at all," replied she to Madelene's question. "I just dropped in to annoy you with my idle self—or, maybe, to please you. You know we're taught at church that a large part of the joy of the saved comes from watching the misery of the damned."
But Madelene had the instinct of the physician born. "She has something on her mind and wants me to help her," she thought. Aloud she said: "I feel idle, myself. We'll sit about for an hour, and you'll stay to dinner with Arthur and me—we have it here to-day, as your mother is going out. Afterwards I must do my round."
A silence, with Adelaide wondering where Ross was and just when he would return. Then Madelene went on: "I've been trying to persuade your mother to give up the house, change it into a hospital."