An Ambitious Man

Judge Lawrence died when Alice was fifteen years of age, leaving both

his widow and his daughter handsomely provided for.

The Baroness not only possessed the Beryngford homestead, but a house

in Washington as well; and both of these were occupied by tenants,

for Mabel insisted upon having her stepmother dwell under her own

roof. Senator Cheney had purchased a house in New York to gratify

his wife and daughter, and it was here the family resided, when not

in Washington or at the seaside resorts. Both women wished to

forget, and to make others forget, that they had ever lived in

Beryngford. They never visited the place and never referred to it.

They desired to be considered "New Yorkers" and always spoke of

themselves as such.

The Baroness was now hopelessly passee. Yet it was the revealing of

the inner woman, rather than the withering of the exterior, which

betrayed her years. The woman who understands the art of bodily

preservation can, with constant toil and care, retain an appearance

of youth and charm into middle life; but she who would pass that

dreaded meridian, and still remain a goodly sight for the eyes of

men, must possess, in addition to all the secrets of the toilet,

those divine elixirs, unselfishness and love for humanity. Faith in

divine powers, too, and resignation to earthly ills, must do their

part to lend the fading eye lustre and to give a softening glow to

the paling cheek. Before middle life, it is the outer woman who is

seen; after middle life, skilled as she may be by art and however

endowed my nature, yet the inner woman becomes visible to the least

discerning eye, and the thoughts and feelings which have dominated

her during all the past, are shown upon her face and form like

printed words upon the open leaves of a book. That is why so many

young beauties become ugly old ladies, and why plain faces sometimes

are beautiful in age.

The Baroness had been unremitting in the care of her person, and she

had by this toil saved her figure from becoming gross, retaining the

upright carriage and the tapering waist of youth, though she was upon

the verge of her sixtieth birthday. Her complexion, too, owing to

her careful diet, her hours of repose, and her knowledge of skin

foods and lotions, remained smooth, fair and unfurrowed. But the

long-guarded expression in her blue eyes of childlike innocence had

given place to the hard look of a selfish and unhappy nature, and the

lines about the small mouth accented the expression of the eyes.