How wise she could be in advice to that pretty butterfly! How plainly she could work out a useful life to be followed by--some one else! Her more thoughtful moods demanded: Why not herself? Her charities of the street, her subscriptions to worthy funds, her patronage of admirable institutions, all these meant nothing. Dozens of fashionables and would-be fashionables did the same. It was expected of them. Those charities opened a door through which many entered the inner circles. She had fitful desires to do the things people did not expect. She detested the shams of life around her in that inner circle. She felt at times she would like to get them all under her feet--trample them down and make room for something better; but for what? She did not know. She was twenty-one, wealthy, her own mistress, and was tired of it all. When she drove past laughing Kora on the avenue she was more tired of it than ever. "How am I better than she but by accident?" she asked herself. "She amuses herself--poor little bondslave, who has only changed masters! I amuse myself (without a master, it is true, and more elegantly, perhaps), but with as little usefulness to the world." She felt ashamed when she thought of Alain and his mother, who seemed to have lived only to help others. They had given over the power to her, and how poorly she had acquitted herself! Once--when she first came with the dowager to Paris--the days had been all too short for her plans and dreams of usefulness; how long ago that seemed. Now, she knew that the owner of wealth is the victim of multitudinous schemes of the mendicant, whether of the street corner or the fashionable missions. She had lost faith in the efficacy of alms. No cause came to her with force enough to re-awaken her enthusiasms. Everything was so tame--so old! One day she read in a journal that the usefulness of Kora as a dancer was over. There had been an accident at the theatre, her foot was smashed; not badly enough to call for amputation, but too much for her ever to dance again. The Marquise wondered if the fair-weather friends would desert her now. She had heard of Trouvelot, an exquisite who followed the fashions in everything, and Kora had succeeded in being the fashion for two seasons. She was just as pretty, no doubt--just as adorable, but--