"But you can be careful how you treat him. You can show him, and everybody, that there's nothing in it. You must--" Henrietta hesitated, dared; "you must be just friendly, as you are with Arden and the rest of the men." Hiram's daughter was scarlet. Full a minute, and a very full minute, of silence. Then Adelaide said coldly: "Thank you. And now that you've freed your mind I hope you'll keep it free for your own affairs." "Ouch!" cried Henrietta, making a wry face. And she devoted the rest of the afternoon to what she realized, at the parting, was the vain task of mollifying Del. She knew that thenceforth she and Adelaide would drift apart; and she was sorry, for she liked her--liked to talk with her, liked to go about with her. Adelaide's beauty attracted the men, and a male audience was essential to Henrietta's happiness; she found the conversation of women--the women she felt socially at ease with--tedious, and their rather problematic power of appreciation limited to what came from men. As she grew older, and less and less pleasing to the eye, the men showed more and more clearly how they had deceived themselves in thinking it was her brains that had made them like her. As Henrietta, with mournful cynicism, put it: "Men the world over care little about women beyond their physical charm. To realize it, look at us American women, who can do nothing toward furthering men's ambitions. We've only our physical charms to offer; we fall when we lose them. And so our old women and our homely women, except those that work or that have big houses and social power, have no life of their own, live on sufferance, alone or the slaves of their daughters or of some pretty young woman to whom they attach themselves." The days dragged for Adelaide. "I'm afraid he'll write," said she--meaning that she hoped he would. Indeed, she felt that he had written, but had destroyed the letters. And she was right; almost all the time he could spare from his efforts to save his father from a sick but obstinately active man's bad judgment was given to writing to her--formal letters which he tore up as too formal, passionate letters which he destroyed as unwarranted and unwise, when he had not yet, face to face, in words, told her his love and drawn from her what he believed was in her heart. The days dragged; she kept away from Henrietta, from all "our set," lest they should read in her dejected countenance the truth, and more. CHAPTER XXIV DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES