,
anyhow. All women of your day were not virtuous--not by a long sight.
I'll admit that your best possibilities have been wasted; I've always
thought that. You have a terrific personality and if you were at your
maturity in this traditionless era you'd be a great national figure,
not a mere social power. But nature in a fit of spite launched you too
soon and the cast-iron traditions were too strong for you. It was the
epoch of the submerged woman."

"Mary Ogden was brought up in those same cast-iron traditions."

"Yes, but Madame Zattiany belongs to a class of women that derive less
from immediate ancestors than from a legendary race of sirens--not so
merely legendary, perhaps, as we think. Convention is only a flexible
harness for such women and plays no part whatever in their secret
lives."

"You're in love with Mary."

"_Don't_ come back to me. I won't have it. For the moment I don't
feel as if I had an atom of personality left, I'm so utterly absorbed
in you; and I'd give my immortal soul to help you."

"Yes, I know that. I wouldn't be turning myself inside out if I
didn't. I've never talked to a living soul as I've talked to you
tonight and I never shall again."

She stared at him for a moment, and then she burst into a loud laugh.
It was awe-inspiring, that laugh. Lucifer in hell, holding his sides
at the futilities of mankind, could not have surpassed it. "What a
mess! What a mess! Life! Begins nowhere, ends nowhere." She went on
muttering to herself, and then, abruptly, she broke into the sarcastic
speech which her friends knew best.

"Lord, Lee, I wish you could have been behind a screen at that
luncheon. Thirteen old tombstones in feathers and net collars--seven
or eight of 'em, anyhow--colonial profiles and lorgnettes, and all
looking as if they'd been hit in the stomach. I at one end of the
table looking like the Witch of Endor, Mary at the other looking like
one of our granddaughters and trying to be animated and intimate. I
forgot my own tragedy and haw-hawed three times. She looked almost
apologetic when she called us by our first names, especially when she
used the diminutive. Polly Vane, who's got a head like a billiard ball
and has to wear a wig for decency's sake, drew herself up twice and
then relaxed with a sickly grin. . . . All the same I don't think Mary
felt any more comfortable or liked it much better than the rest of us.
Too much like reading your own epitaph on a