Poor Margot! How the little girls in plain clothes--and machine-made underwear--must have envied her as she swept along in her limousine, dressed with that enormously costly simplicity which only the rich can afford. No wonder many of the other girls at the Ryper school hated her. For, her mother was in one respect unlike most of the fashionable mothers who are too busy doing things not worth doing to attend to their children. Her mother gave her loving care, spent many hours--of anxious thought, no doubt--in planning to make her the most luxurious, the most helpless, the most envied girl in the school. We hear unendingly about the good that love does in the world. Not too much--no, indeed! But at the same time might it not be well if we also heard about the harm love can do--and does? How many sons and daughters have been ruined by loving parents! How many husbands have been wrecked by the flatteries and the assiduities of loving wives! How many wives have been lured to decay and destruction by the over-indulgent love of their husbands! What we need in this world is not more sentiment, but more intelligence. Sentiment is a force that rushes far and crazily in _both_ directions, gentle reader, unless it has well-balanced intelligence to guide it. Margot, smiling in the doorway of the breakfast room, put me at once into a less somber humor. She was tall and slim--an inch taller than her mother and with the same supple, well-proportioned figure. She had her mother’s small, tip-tilted face and luminous eyes, but they were of an intense dark gray that gave her an expression of poetic thoughtfulness and mystery. Whiter or more perfectly formed teeth I have never seen. In former days children’s teeth were neglected. But my wife, with her peculiar reach for all matters having to do with appearances, had learned the modern methods of caring for the body when Margot was still in the period when the body is almost as formable as sculptor’s clay. Thus Margot’s teeth had been looked after and made perfect and kept so. Her hair hung loose upon her shoulders like a wonderful changeable veil of golden brown. Often at first glance you are dazzled by these carefully fed and carefully groomed children of the rich, only to note at the second glance that the best showing has been made of precious little in the way of natural charm. But this was not true of Margot. The longer you looked, and the more attentively, the finer she seemed to be--like a rare perfect specimen from a connoisseur’s greenhouses. There’s no doubt about it, Edna did know the physical side of life. She would have got notable results even had we been poor. As it was, with all the money she cared to spend, she performed what looked like miracles. “Come and kiss me, Margot,” said I. She obeyed, with a charming air of restrained eagerness that is regarded as ladylike. “My car is waiting,” said she. “I’m late.” “Is that Therese”--her maid--“out in the hall waiting to go with you?”