Leaning against the window seat, she tried to interest herself in her fellow-invalids.

But she had not then the secret which unlocks the mystery of faces; she was still in the darkness in which most of us proudly strut away our lives, deriding as dreamers or cranks those who are in the light and see.

With almost all of us the innate sympathies of race, which give even wolves and vultures the sense of fraternal companionship in the storm and stress of the struggle for existence, are deep overlaid with various kinds of that egotistic ignorance called class feeling.

Adelaide felt sorry for "the poor," but she had yet to learn that she was of them, as poor in other and more important ways as they in money and drawing-room manners.

Surfaces and the things of the surface obscured or distorted all the realities for her, as for most of us; and the fact that her intelligence laughed at and scorned her perverted instincts was of as little help to her as it is to most of us.
When Madelene was free she said to her sister-in-law, in mock seriousness, "Well, and what can I do for _you_!" as if she were another patient.
Adelaide's eyes shifted.