render the last service she could to the world by leaving it.

The impartial historian scarcely knows how to distribute his pathos.
By the electric light (and that is the modern light) gayety is almost as
pathetic as suffering. Before the Montana girl hit upon the happy device
that gave her notoriety, her feet, whose every twinkle now was worth a
gold eagle, had trod a thorny path. There was a fortune now in the whirl
of her illusory robes, but any day--such are the whims of fashion--she
might be wandering again, sick at heart, about the great city, knocking
at the side doors of variety shows for any engagement that would give her
a pittance of a few dollars a week. How long had Carmen waited on the
social outskirts; and now she had come into her kingdom, was she anything
but a tinsel queen? Even Henderson, the great Henderson, did the friends
of his youth respect him? had he public esteem? Carmen used to cut out
the newspaper paragraphs that extolled Henderson's domestic virtue and
his generosity to his family, and show them to her lord, with a queer
smile on her face. Miss Tavish, in the nervous consciousness of fleeting
years, was she not still waiting, dashing here and there like a bird in a
net for the sort of freedom, audacious as she was, that seemed denied
her? She was still beautiful, everybody said, and she was sought and
flattered, because she was always merry and good-natured. Why should Van
Dam, speaking of women, say that there were horses that had been set up,
and checked up and trained, that held their heads in an aristocratic
fashion, moved elegantly, and showed style, long after the spirit had
gone out of them? And Jack himself, happily married, with a comfortable
income, why was life getting flat to him? What sort of career was it
that needed the aid of Carmen and the serpentine dancer? And why not,
since it is absolutely necessary that the world should be amused?

We are in no other world when we enter the mean tenement in the alley off