to the work and poverty that he could never stoop to from the innate
refinement and elegance of his being, and he to hunt up the heiress to
whom he would give the honor of maintaining him in his true sphere.

But his little melodrama was entirely spoiled by her matter-of-fact
way, and what was worse still he felt in her presence as if he did not
amount to much, and that she knew it; and yet, like the poor moth that
singes its wings around the lamp, he could not keep away.

The prominent trait of Gus's character, as of so many others in our
luxurious age of self-pleasing, was weakness; and yet one must be
insane with vanity to be at ease if he can do nothing resolutely and
dare nothing great. He is a cripple, and, if not a fool, knows it.

During the eventful month that followed Mr. Allen's death, Mrs. Allen
and her daughters led what seemed to them a very strange life. While
in one sense it was real and intensely painful, in another the
experiences were so new and strange that it all seemed an unreal
dream, a distressing nightmare of trouble and danger, from which they
might awaken to their old life.

Mrs. Allen, from her large circle of acquaintances, had numerous
callers, many coming from mere morbid curiosity, more from mingled
motives, and not a few from genuine tearful sympathy. To these "her
friends," as she emphatically called them, she found a melancholy
pleasure in recounting all the recent woes, in which she ever appeared
as chief sufferer and chief mourner, though her husband seemed among
the minor losses, and thus most of her time was spent daring the last
few weeks at her old home. Her friends appeared to find a melancholy
pleasure in listening to these details and then in recounting them