not practical, and still passionate and inclined to dissipation. However, the aimless, fatuous going to pieces of Ira George Carter, the looming pathos of the future of the children, and a growing sense of affection and responsibility had finally sobered her. The lure of love and life had not entirely disappeared, but her chance of sipping at those crystal founts had grown sadly slender. A woman of thirty-eight and still possessing some beauty, she was not content to eat the husks provided for the unworthy. Her gorge rose at the thought of that neglected state into which the pariahs of society fall and on which the inexperienced so cheerfully comment. Neglected by her own set, shunned by the respectable, her fortune quite gone, she was nevertheless determined that she would not be a back-street seamstress or a pensioner upon the bounty of quondam friends. By insensible degrees came first unhallowed relationships through friendship and passing passion, then a curious intermediate state between the high world of fashion and the half world of harlotry, until, finally, in Louisville, she had become, not openly, but actually, the mistress of a house of ill repute. Men who knew how these things were done, and who were consulting their own convenience far more than her welfare, suggested the advisability of it. Three or four friends like Colonel Gillis wished rooms—convenient place in which to loaf, gamble, and bring their women. Hattie Starr was her name now, and as such she had even become known in a vague way to the police—but only vaguely—as a woman whose home was suspiciously gay on occasions. Cowperwood, with his appetite for the wonders of life, his appreciation of the dramas which produce either failure or success, could not help being interested in this spoiled woman who was sailing so vaguely the seas of chance. Colonel Gillis once said that with some strong man to back her, Nannie Fleming could be put back into society. She had a pleasant appeal—she and her two children, of whom she never spoke. After a few visits to her home Cowperwood spent hours talking with Mrs. Carter whenever he was in Louisville. On one occasion, as they were entering her boudoir, she picked up a photograph of her daughter from the dresser and dropped it into a drawer. Cowperwood had never seen this picture before. It was that of a girl of fifteen or sixteen, of whom he obtained but the most fleeting glance. Yet, with that instinct for the essential and vital which invariably possessed him, he gained a keen impression of it. It was of a delicately haggard child with a marvelously agreeable smile, a fine, high-poised head upon a thin neck, and an air of bored superiority. Combined with this was a touch of weariness about the eyelids which drooped in a lofty way. Cowperwood was fascinated. Because of the daughter he professed an interest in the mother, which he really did not feel.