"It is part of Hilda's good luck that her pleasures are not costly, or rather that she can herself defray their cost," said Katherine quietly. "She has always lived in her art--seemed to care for nothing else. My life would indeed have been dreadful had I not accepted the interests that came into it. I have always felt, too, that in following the natural bent of my own character, I was laying foundations that might some day repay Hilda for everything. If she has friends--a public--it is owing to me. It was I who persuaded her to come to London last spring. I, therefore, who assured her future, in a sense, for there Allan Hope fell in love with her. I have felt that I have been doing my duty, in my own far less conventionally fine way, but doing it nevertheless. I make a circle for mamma; I brighten her life and my own and Hilda's, as far as she will let me. Certain _tools_ are necessary--Hilda needs brushes and canvases and studios; I, a few gowns, a few cabs, and a supply of neat boots and gloves. Still the contrast is uncomplimentary to me, I own; but when Hilda proposed this work of hers, I entreated her to give up the idea--I said we would all starve together rather. She insisted, and how can I interfere?" "I can understand, Katherine, that everything you say is most convincing to yourself; I see the perfect honesty of your own point of view. But, my dear girl, it is slightly sophistical honesty. Hilda denies herself the commonest comforts of life, not only to give you the luxuries, but because her high sense of honor rebels against spending on herself money that is owed to others. Don't misunderstand me; I don't ask any such perhaps overstrained sense of responsibility from you. You have, no doubt, been fully justified in living your own life; but could it not have been lived with a little less elegance? I am sure that you would be welcomed everywhere, Katherine, with even fewer gowns and fewer gloves." Katherine flushed lightly; her flushes were never deep, and always becoming. It certainly cut her now to hear his almost unconscious implication--that from her he expected a less perfect sense of honor than from her sister. She swallowed a certain wrathful mortification that welled up, and answered with some apparent cheerfulness-- "You don't know your world, Peter, if you fancy that even Katherine Archinard would be welcome in darned and dirty gloves!" Odd walked on silently. "And might she not be forced into taking some girlish distraction?" he said presently. "It came out yesterday, with that astounding air of _excusing_ herself she has, that she reads to her mother in the evening! Could not you do that, Katherine, and let Hilda profit now and then by the _entourage_ you have created for her?" Katherine's flush deepened. "Mamma doesn't care for my reading, and Hilda won't go out; she goes to bed too early."