It was an unfairness which descended to the second generation and
would descend through the years until the equalizing forces of
character and will--or the lack of them--brought later generations to
the same level of condition. Markham could not help comparing Hermia
Challoner with her less fortunate sister--Hermia Challoner, the
courted, the fted, who had but to wish for a thing to have it
granted, with Dorothy Herrick, the neglected and forgotten, who was
bartering her youth for twelve dollars a week and was glad to get the
money; one, who boasted that the only value life had for her was what
she could get out of it, with the other, who almost felt it a
privilege to be permitted to live at all. The more he thought of
these two girls, the more convincing was his belief that Miss Herrick
did not suffer by the comparison. She was doing just what thousands
of other girls were doing in New York, with no more patience and no
more self-sacrifice than they, but the childish vagaries of his
visitor, still fresh in his memory, seemed to endow Dorothy Herrick
with a firmer contour, a stronger claim on his interest and
sympathies.

And yet--this little madcap aviatrix disclosed a winning directness
and simplicity which charmed and surprised him. She was a joyous
soul. He could not remember a morning when he had been so completely
abstracted from the usual current of thought and occupation as today,
and whatever the faults bequeathed by her intrepid father, she was, as
Markham had said to Olga, quite human. There were possibilities in
the child-and it seemed a pity that no strong guiding hand led the way
on a road like hers, which had so many turnings. She was only an
overgrown child as yet, flat chested, slender, almost a boy, and yet
redeemed to femininity by an unconscious coquetry which she could no