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All this was at the beginning of her passing beyond the years of girlhood.

And she went on waiting for him, opportunity after opportunity, to speak to him the plaintive talk of her soul; and he would promise her and not keep his word.

And the days pass swiftly, one upon another, without any mercy... and dissipation sinks its hold deeper into the beloved brother... so he forgets house and family, takes to wine and falls in love with gambling.

And his sister's eyes stream with tears — but between herself and herself alone. And this restless soul turns away from amusement and from food, a turning-away against which neither the doctors' devices nor their drugs avail.

And it ends with her wasting

to such thinness that the doctors fear for her chest, and they send her away to a sanatorium, where more than once she tempts herself toward suicide.

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But shall she leave him to floun-der in this headlong course alone, thus, without a helper to right the stumblings of the crooked way?... Then she will live, and she will help her doctors toward a swift cure.

And a month passes, and another; and the members of the family visit the sick girl one by one, and likewise her friends and the companions of her age; all except him — yes, her beloved brother, for whose sake she had hated life, and then come to love it again, likewise for his sake.

And in the sanatorium she comes to know things she could never have come to know had she remained in her own milieu, within its narrow bounds. And she meets the world with another face than the one she had been accustomed to meet it with.

She faced misery in people in all its kinds, and so ceased to heed her own private misery; she faced, with the sick, their various crises, and learned from them how to stand fast against them and defy them.

Her idealism, in her past life, had moved upon a theoretical, philosophical plane; after she had passed through the treatment of those afflictions it became practi-cal and applied. And so her moral loftiness began to sit more lightly upon her, until she came to find, for every disapproved gesture of people's, an excuse to lay before their pretensions.

And thus she lowered her two wings, that had soared so high, to be a genuine human being; for in this humanity there is an interplay that all the philosophies

of the universe together do not possess.

But was she truly able to be that person who disowns everything bound to the past... so as to create herself anew?

And was it given to her to forget that younger brother, wandering the earth far, far away? Had she done so, she would have disowned the sweetest and most delightful of her hours.

And what can make up for the dear, merry memories she had so long lived — as she has not once lived her practical life now — when she would come to him, her soul all eagerness, from one country to another, to share with him for a spell of time his simple, austere life, leaving her parental home, aristocratic in its ways, to grieve at her parting.

And there... she would tend him