ound to have it.
She doesn't have to hunt for it, either."

"Were you ever in--love?" asked Valerie, curiously.

"Now, dear, if I ever had been happily in love is it likely you wouldn't
know it?"

"I suppose so," said Valerie.... She added, musingly:

"I wonder what will become of me if I ever fall in love."

"If you'll take my advice you'll run."

"Run? Where? For goodness' sake!"

"Anywhere until you became convalescent."

"That would be a ridiculous idea," remarked Valerie so seriously that
Rita began to laugh:

"You sweet thing," she said, "it's a million chances that you'd be
contented only with the sort of man who wouldn't marry you."

"Because I'm poor, you mean? Or because I am working for my living?"

"Both--and then some."

"What else?"

"Why, the only sort of men who'd attract you have come out of their own
world of their own accord to play about for a while in our world. They
can go back; that is the law. But they can't take us with them."

"They'd be ashamed, you mean?"

"Perhaps not. A man is likely enough to try. But alas! for us, if we're
silly enough to go. I tell you, Valerie, that their world is full of
mothers and sisters and feminine relatives and friends who could no more
endure us than they would permit us to endure them. It takes courage for
a man to ask us to go into that world with him; it takes more for us to
do it. And our courage is vain. We stand no chance. It means a rupture
of all his relations; and a drifting--not into our world, not into his,
but into a horrible midway void, peopled by derelicts.... I know, dear,
believe me. And I say that to fall in love is no good, no use, for us.
We've been spoiled for what we might once have found satisfactory. We
are people without a class, you and I."

Valerie laughed: "That gives us the more liberty, doesn't it?"

"It's up to us, dear. We are our own law, social and spiritual. If we
live inside it we are not going to be any too happy. If we live without
it--I don't know. Sometimes I wonder whether some of the pretty girls
you and I see at Rector's--"

"I've wondered, too.... They _look_ happy--some of them."

"I suppose they are--for a while.... But the worst of it is that it
never lasts."

"I suppose not." Valerie pondered, grave, velvet-eyed, idly twisting a
grass stem.

"After all," she said, "perhaps a brief happiness--with love--is worth
the consequences."

"Many women risk it.... I wonder how many men, if social