With all this came the humiliation of dire poverty. Her money was all spent, and they could no longer pay for the food and shelter they were receiving in a dingy little hotel in a second-class city. For a time she was kept from sinking under the avalanche of miseries that fell upon her by an illusion to which she held with the clutch of desperation. That was her faith in Doring’s love. Feeble of intellect and contemptible of character as she now knew him to be, she still loved him and believed that he loved her, not knowing that the power to love is in proportion to intellectual capacity and moral development, that a weak nature is as wavering in its affections as in other things, an easy prey to every fulsome word and smile from new sirens. A woman in the hotel made the art of flattering men a business and had had many years practice in it. By way of recompense for what external charms Time had taken from her, it had given her considerable skill in her art, a skill she seldom used without effect. Her method of erotic archery was of a coarse and common order, but as her victims dropped readily enough, when she twanged her bow, there was no need to resort to subtler ones. It was her opinion that fine work in her specialty was thrown away upon men, one and all; that nothing was too gross for their vanity to feed upon, and her experiences bore out her theories. Doring’s symmetrical face and figure caught her fancy, and she leveled her trusty crossbow at him, and brought him down with the first arrow, an albatross to be proud of, she thought. Her work went merrily on, and the unsuspecting Cartice saw none of it. More experienced eyes did, however. All the rest of the women in the house were aware of it, and some of the bolder ones undertook the delicate work of opening Mrs. Doring’s eyes. While they veiled their good intentions in indirect phraseology she would not see it, and when they came down to plain speech she resented it as a thing absurd and impossible. They went away with ruffled feathers, but predicting a day of doom for her in the near future, when something would happen that would make her see. They were true prophets, for the day was at hand. As she was passing through the hall in the twilight she came upon two figures clasped in each other’s arms under the broad stairway. They were her husband and Mrs. Parker, the distinguished archer. Without a word Cartice walked away from them. In a few minutes Doring entered her room with the tittering, airy manner of one who pretends to find himself in a highly humorous situation. “Well, Heart’s Ease, you caught me flirting a bit, didn’t you?” he gurgled, making a stagy effort to be facetious. “Is that flirting?” she asked, in the most composed and polite voice. “Why, yes, of course. What else could it be?”