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“I must do something to help along; and nobody need know, unless I choose.” It was while thus serving that the Doctor and Paul had first met her, when the Doctor was a patient after his bicycle accident in a miniature cyclone. It was in the hospital that Doctor Wise had first read her hand, and made a note of it as approaching the psychic type more clearly than any other he had then met.

From the Doctor’s point of view Adele’s hand was indeed suggestive, but not so purely psychical as to intimate mysticism to excess. It was rather that of a vivid idealist than a moody mystic,—too much intellectuality in the upper part, as well as assertion in the thumb and clearness in the head-line, not to influence and modify the natural tendency and scope as shown by the general form. It was not the hand of one whose vague aspirations after the good but unattainable would lead to extremes either in the activities of communism or socialistic vagaries, nor in the opposite direction towards the passive life of an ascetic. Either one would have soon disgusted Adele. It was the hand of one who endeavored to be logical, and did have common sense; yet in the exuberance of feeling sometimes put her hero upon a pedestal only to find the pedestal had a crack in it and the hero was in danger. As to the hero himself, he was never affected; she remained true to her hero, no sawdust in him; but she certainly did put him quietly aside on the shelf when she found herself beyond his point of view. She simply put him on the shelf to “think it out for himself,” as she had done for herself,—and in consequence had more would-be heroes following in her train, striving to catch up, than is generally found in the domain of hero worship.