Curiously enough, Mrs. Gilchrist was renowned for her activity as a philanthropist and charity worker. Her social prestige, aside from her strength of character, was based upon this. She was a perennial patroness, a member of hospital boards, a chairman of bazaars, special matinees, charity balls and money-raising campaigns. All these activities were in the interest of the poor. The money raised by them went toward bringing comfort to creatures whose moral obliquity and human weaknesses Mrs. Gilchrist authentically despised. Yet she was indefatigable in her work, darting in her unvarying black dress from meeting to meeting, bristling with magnificent plans for further philanthropies. Her husband occasionally wondered. He was unable to reconcile the coldness he knew in his wife with the character of her labors. At times he dimly felt that it was her way of saying something--perhaps a way of showing a hidden warmth toward people. But in Mrs. Gilchrist's thought there was no such explanation. To have admitted to herself a concern for the creatures in whose behalf she devoted her energies would have been to open a door in the tiny fortress, or at least to create a loophole out of which she might look with sympathy upon the confusions and torments of her fellows. Her inner humanism, divorced from the narrow limits of her consciousness, was finding its outlet, as her husband suspected, in her work. But during this work never for a moment did Mrs. Gilchrist think of the creatures she was benefiting. She had rationalized her activities and made them a part of the emotionless content of her mind. All relation between the things she did and the people she did them for was divorced in her thought. In bazaars she superintended, in balls, fêtes, campaigns, auctions she energized with her presence, she saw only bazaars, balls, fêtes, campaigns and auctions. She worked for their success with an invulnerable preoccupation in the details which went to make them socially proper and financially triumphant. The altruism of her work inspired no altruism in her. She did not allow herself to sympathise with the weakness and poverties she was aiding or even to contemplate them for an instant. Yet her work accomplished, the charity a success, she experienced the stern elation of "having done good." This elation was inspired in no way by the thought of the solace she had brought to others. It was entirely egoistic--a moment in which her rectitude congratulated itself upon--its rectitude. 7 Fanny Basine smiled timidly at Aubrey. He was paying little attention to her. He was listening to Judge Smith airing his views on the annexation of the Philippines.