recatingly. "Must I be as
concrete with you as with her? Surely culture, and all that it
implies, need not be forced to defend itself with concrete examples?"

"I'm afraid that I agree with Ann," said the soft voice in the shadow.
"I'm afraid that so far as I am concerned, culture needs just that
defence."

She tried to smile the superior smile she had mustered for Ann,
kneeling in her checked sunbonnet, but this was difficult, with a woman
so obviously of her own class and kind. Still the woman was clearly
unreasonable, and she was able, at least, to speak forcibly as she
replied,

"Aren't you rather severe on the enormous majority of us, in that case?
We can't all be great philosophers or productive artists, you know, and
yet between us and Ann's preserved strawberries and Hester's scrubbing
there's a wide gulf--you must admit that!"

The stranger rose lightly from her chair and walked, with a swaying
motion like a long-stemmed wild flower, toward the home-made
window-door. At the sill she paused and fixed her great eyes on the
stronger woman--stronger, plainly, for the frail white hand on the
china knob supported her while she stood, and she seemed to cling to
the woodwork and press against it as she sank into the shadow of the
eaves.

"A wide gulf, indeed," she said slowly, in her soft, breathless voice,
with an intonation almost like a foreigner's, her listener decided
suddenly, "a gulf so wide that unless you can cross it with some bridge
of honest accomplishment, it will swallow you all very soon--you women
of culture!"

She slipped across the sill and presently Hester's clear, firm voice
was heard in the narrow hall,

"Yes, yes, I'm coming!" and the balcony was drowned in the dusk, and
the woman on it yielded consciously to the great desire for sleep that
possessed her. But before she drifted off, not afraid, this time, of
night under the sky, it occurred to her dimly that Hester's other
patient must come through her own room whenever she used the little
_loggia_.

"What is she--an anarchist? a socialist?" she thought. "I must surely
ask Hester about her. 'You women of culture,' indeed! What does she
call herself, I wonder?"

That next morning as she waited idly for bath and breakfast, the
stranger possessed her thoughts more and more. Only in such an
absolutely unconventional place, she told herself, could a completely
unknown woman appear (in her own apartments, really) and discuss with