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 They had by this time reached their rooms, and Miriam was making a preliminary sorting of objects to be packed. "Don't you think," she ventured, "that you are inclined to be a little headlong as a philosopher?"

Louise was deftly choosing the articles of her toilette for the evening. "Oh, no doubt of it! But I'm too deep in my sea now to care. I simply swim on and on, after a shoal of notions."

"And splash a little," commented Miriam, with an abstracted air that saved the remark from being censorious. She was wondering whether she had been over-scrupulous in refusing the gown that Adèle had privately offered her by way of commission. And a little resentful that Adèle should dare offer it to her. Miriam was old enough to remember a day when such transactions were considered off-color, and it bothered her that she should be so old-fashioned as to be unable to accept the place assigned her in the callous new order, as some of her former friends, with the greatest complacence, seemed to have done. Suddenly, bereft of credit in a society to which she had once felt herself a necessary adjunct, catching occasional glimpses of faces that recalled school-days to her, and Newport and Paris, faces now hard, bright and mercenary, Miriam felt abandoned.

Her thoughts strayed westward and hovered. In Alberta she had been an exile; but not so acutely alone as here.