After which reflection, Mr. Brotherton walked down the long store room to his dark stained desk, turned on the electric under the square copper shade, and began to figure up his accounts. But a little social problem kept revolving in his head. It was suggested by Mrs. Van Dorn and by something she had said. Beside Mrs. Van Dorn in her tailored gown and seal-skin, with her spanking new midwinter hat to match her coat, dragging the useless dog after her, he saw the picture of another woman who had come in the day before--a woman no older than Margaret Van Dorn--yet a broken woman, with rounded shoulders who rarely smiled, wishing to hide her broken teeth, who wheeled one baby and led another, and shooed a third and slipped into the corner near the magazine counter and thumbed over the children's fashions in the _Delineator_ eagerly and looked wistfully at the beautiful things in the store. Her red hands and brown skin showed that she had lived a rough, hard life, and that it had spent her and wasted her and taken everything she prized--and given her nothing--nothing but three overdressed children and a husband whose industrial status had put its heavy mark on her. Mr. Brotherton's memory went back ten years, and recalled the two girls together--Violet and Margaret. Both were light-headed and vain; so far as their relations with Van Dorn were concerned, one was as blamable as the other. Yet one had prospered and the other had not--and the one who had apparently suffered most had upon the whole lived the cleaner, more normal life--and Mr. Brotherton drummed his penholder upon the black desk before him and questioned the justice of life. But, indeed, if we must judge life's awards and benefits from the material side there is no justice in life. If there was any difference between the two women whom Tom Van Dorn had wronged--difference in rewards or punishments, it must have been in their hearts. It is possible that in her life of motherhood and wifehood, in the sacrifices that broke her body and scarred her face, Violet Mauling may have been compensated by the love she bore the children upon whom she lavished her life. For she had that love, and she did squander--in blind vain folly--the strength of her body, afterwards the price of her soul--upon her children. As for Margaret Van Dorn--Mr. Brotherton was no philosopher. He could not pity her. Yet she too had given all. She had given her mind--and it was gone. She had given her heart and it was gone also, and she had given that elusive blending of the heart and mind we call her soul--and that was gone, too. Mr. Brotherton could see that they were gone--all gone. But he could not see that her loss was greater than Violet's.