Seated at her toilet table and looking into her mirror with her cheeks resting upon her hands, she gazed introspectively at herself and destiny. Her tiara of diamonds still crested her forehead. Somehow it pleased her to leave it undisturbed until she was ready to let down her hair. She was conscious that she had reached the age when she preferred to see herself at her best rather than in the garb of nature's disorder. It had been one of the eventful evenings of her life; she felt that by her efforts mind and matter had been drawn closer together without detriment to either. And everybody had been extremely civil to Lucille, at which she could not help rejoicing. Certainly, too, Lucille was acquiring more social charm and was more anxious to please people of cultivation. Then, too, her brother had appeared in his most engaging mood as a consequence of the defeat of the legacy tax bill. No reason for doubting her conclusion that the passage of the measure would have been premature under existing conditions had occurred to her; so it seemed that society had been saved from a mistake. Altogether the immediate present was marred by no unpleasant memory but one. As to that, she felt that she had acted indulgently, and that on the morrow she would make a last effort to rescue the unhappy degenerate. As she surveyed herself in the glass she appreciated that she was well preserved and that her grizzled hair was becoming, but that the romance of life was over. She would never marry again; she was unequivocally middle-aged. Ideas were what she had left; but for this great interest she had many years of strength and activity ahead of her. Ideas! How absorbing they were, and yet how little the most disinterested individual could accomplish! Truth looked so near, and yet ever seemed to recede as one approached it. Men and women came and went, generations lived and died, but progress, like the march of the glaciers, was to be measured by the centuries. The inequalities of life--how hideous were they still; how far from rectification, in spite of priests and charity! What was the key to the riddle? Where was the open sesame to the social truth which should be universal beauty? She was seeking it with all her soul, but she would never find it. Deep in the womb of time it lay, a magnet, yet inscrutable. Who would unearth it? Would it baffle mankind forever? or would centuries hence some searcher--perhaps a woman like herself--discern and reveal it?