So the days adjusted themselves to a routine so smooth and orderly that sometimes even to Helen it seemed unbelievable that it was not the expression of ease and happiness. Only at times, however, for as she looked at Gage it was impossible not to be conscious of the strain under which he was laboring. He was often out nights, working or not--she did not know. She knew that the supply of whisky in the sideboard was replenished far too often to serve moderate drinking and she knew that Gage slept badly, for she could often see the light reflected from his windows in the early hours of the morning. He never molested her now but left her to her own activities with hardly a jeer at them. Now and then some scathing remark escaped him and fell blunted from the armor of her indifference. But for the most part his early chafing under her prominence was gone. The flood of letters which came for her in every mail aroused no comment from him. He saw her at work on the organization of her section of the country and hardly seemed to notice what she did. Intent as she was on learning what she could do, how she could do it, always with the thought in the back of her mind that she needed to find a kind of work that would earn her independence as well as notoriety she put an entirely new seriousness into the work she was doing. The old dilettantism was gone and with the death of that half-mocking dilettante spirit came an entirely new zest for the work she did. Mrs. Brownley was full of a glorious naïveté. She wanted to organize everybody. Politics fairly dripped from her impressive, deliberately moulded lips. She wanted to pin a small white elephant badge on every one she met. She had a practical eye that liked to translate enthusiasm into badges, buttons and costumes. Jerrold Haynes, rather indispensable now and then to Helen, said that he was sure that the end of the campaign would see Mrs. Brownley in full elephant’s costume. Jerrold laughed at Helen too. He told her frankly that she was ruining herself for an observer. “A year ago you were in a fair way to become the most beautiful philosopher of the twentieth century. Now you’re like all the rest of the women--a good looking hustler. You’ve become ordinary in appealing to your big audience. You should have been content to charm Gage and me.” “I was. But I wasn’t allowed to remain in my sloth.” “No--that serpent of a Duffield girl. I seem to remember Gage didn’t like her either. I didn’t, but undoubtedly Gage and I wouldn’t agree on reasons, would we? Well, where is she now?” “Down on Long Island somewhere with Harriet Thompson, resting. She was pretty well fagged out with the months here.” “Didn’t marry Carpenter, did she?” “No. Apparently she didn’t or we might have heard of it.” “Carpenter saved himself from the yoke of feminism just in time, perhaps.” “I haven’t seen him lately.”