"And much better for them, too!" the Honolulu man put in.

"How about Leonardo and Petrarch?" the great artist queried from his end
of the table, and then for a few moments the conversation got off into
the question of the social position of artists in the renaissance and
their relation to their patrons, which bored Milly, but the Hawaiian
brought it back to his point.

"So that's why we have no real creators to-day in any of the arts," he
asserted. "They're merely a lot of little citizens who daub canvass to
support a wife and a respectable house or pay the butcher's bill with
fluffy stories about silly women and impossible heroes." (This, Milly
thought, was a raw stab at young Roberts. She wondered how men could say
such things to one another and still remain friends.) "They have
bank-accounts and go to dinner-parties."

To which the story-teller retorted when he got his chance:--

"What you fellows always mean by 'living' is messing around with some
woman who isn't your own wife. A good many of our modern citizens manage
to live their own lives that way, and what does it do for them?"

Milly approved.

"That's just the trouble: society damns them and finishes them if they
don't behave like proper _bourgeois_. Take the case of----" and he cited
an instance of a young artist who was having much newspaper notoriety
over his passional experiments. "Women kill art, anyway," he concluded
with a growl.

Thereat Roberts' southern blood was touched, and he launched into a
glowing sentimental eulogy of Woman as the Inspirer of Men towards the
Noblest Things, and incidentally of the peace and the purity of
marriage. Milly liked what he said, although it seemed to her rather
florid in phrasing, and she felt an instinctive hostility towards the
fat gentleman from Honolulu, whom she suspected of disgusting
immorality. (Later in New York she was astonished to learn that Roberts
had had a very scandalous divorce from a wife, while the Hawaiian lived
a laborious and apparently upright life, supporting a mother, as a
newspaper correspondent. She learned then that men's expressed views had
very little to do with their conduct, and that an ideal was often merely
the sentimental reaction from experience.)

Just as Milly, thinking she heard Virginia cry in the room above,
slipped away from the table some one said,--

"A man who has anything to do in the world will never let a woman stand
in his way. If he does, he is soft, an