Dress, the great mania of the empty minded, she had outgrown. She
knew instinctively the colour and the style most becoming to her
beauty, and she used these with the ease and assurance of an expert.
She was proud of her beautiful face and figure and held them as
divine gifts, the surest tokens of the fulfilment of her desires.

Her heart, rich in the ripened treasures of unspent motherhood,
brooded in tenderness over her new work--the tortures of half-starved
mothers, their doomed babes, their idle fathers, and the misery of
the poor and the fallen. This yearning to help she knew to be the
cry within her own soul for peace. How to express this fullness
of life Gordon was teaching her. Slowly and unconsciously she
was clothing this powerful, athletic man with every attribute of
her ideal. His steel-gray eyes seemed to pierce her very soul and
say, "I understand you; come with me." His eloquence and emotional
thinking were more and more to her the voice of a prophet seer. His
face, that flashed and trembled, smiled and clouded with fires of
smouldering passion, held her as in a spell. She knew this power
was slowly tightening about her heart, yet she rejoiced in its very
pain. When she greeted him, and he unconsciously held her soft hand
in his big blue-veined grasp, a sense of restful joy came she knew
not whence nor why.

Her enthusiasm in his work, her faith and cheering flattery were
drawing him with resistless magnetism.

As the summer advanced the heat became so terrific and the suffering
in the city so great that Gordon determined to stay at his post and
take his vacation in the fall. Mrs. Ransom fussed and fumed over
Kate's determination to stay, but there was no help for it.