e. She lowered her eyes before the
congregation--a hundred-eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through
which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a
delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the clutch of
the tyrant, Freedom. Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent
cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child. She was
hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait-jacketed, silenced,
ordered. When they came out the minister stopped to greet them.
Mary could only hang her head and answer "Yes, sir," and "No, sir,"
to his questions. When she saw that the other women carried their
hymn-books at their waists with their left hands, she blushed and
moved hers there, too, from her right.

She took the three-o'clock train back to the city. At nine she sat
at the round table for dinner in the Cafe Andre. Nearly the same
crowd was there.

"Where have you been to-day?" asked Mrs. Pothunter. "I 'phoned to
you at twelve."

"I have been away in Bohemia," answered Mary, with a mystic smile.

There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax. For I
was to have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little
country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship
in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and
treasure and move away beyond the hills. It is a hillside that you
turn your head to peer at from the windows of the Through Express.

At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness
and slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her.
Instantly she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that
he shrank down, sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across
his leering features. And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of
great wings come upon a flock of chattering sparrows. One had broken
the paramount law of sham-Bohemia--the law of "_Laisser faire_." The
shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received.
With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the play-room of his
pupils was that blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves
and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at
their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it;
it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the
fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling-house doors of the
Heart.

With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exagg