Yet gradually one great passion was growing within her. That process of thought which had begun in her encounter with Philip Beekman, when she left his mother's employment, had been hastened in its growth by what Marian Lennox had said and failed to do, and the shock of the girl's embarkation upon her new profession had only momentarily retarded it. She was not large enough--few of us are--to see the conditions behind the individual, nor yet greatly to concern herself with individuals that did not directly concern her; but she saw clearly her own plight, and now saw, or thought she saw, that this plight was due entirely to the machinations of the man who had taken her from her home and brought her to New York. She could have loved him, and so she hated him; she could still feel a tenderness for what he might have been, so she permitted herself to feel only animosity for what he had proved himself to be. To him she traced directly all that had befallen her, and as she could not go beyond him, so from him, she slowly and finally resolved, she would exact payment. That thought waxed in her tired mind; it was fed with every throe of her pained body until it dominated her circumscribed outlook upon the world. It even saved her from suffering, because it so possessed her that it armored her against all lesser things. She had found, at last, a purpose in life. It was almost coincident with her realization of this that Mary realized something else. She went immediately to a physician. Dr. Helwig, a man with an enormous paunch and a round face and triple chin, was one of the many excellent practitioners that depend for their living--and it is a good one--upon the class to which Mary belonged. He treated the matter for what it was: a commonplace in his day's work. At the end of a week he confirmed her fears. For a moment she reeled under the blow. The bookcases with their ponderous volumes in dark bindings, the shelves burdened with phials, the glass medicine-case, the convertible table for minor operations, the crowded desk, and even the fat physician before it, seemed to whirl in a mad saraband. "Come, come!" she heard the doctor say, as he thrust an uncorked bottle of smelling-salts under her nose. "How long will it last?" she panted. "We must keep up our treatment for six months or a year," he answered. "Meantime, diet and quiet. No liquor. If you were a millionaire, I'd prescribe a long sea-voyage or a trip to Hot Springs." Out of the chaos of her brain a sudden idea was shaping. "What," she inquired, "about other people catching this?" He knew her business perfectly, and he knew that what he had to say on this point would weigh but little in the scale against want. Nevertheless, he made the common answer. After that she listened to all the instructions that he gave her. More than ever now she had her purpose in life. XXVI "THE LEAST OF THESE"