"Where? Peter and you and I, I suppose."

"There are plenty of good men."

"What do you call a good man?"

Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:--

"Honorable men."

Anna smiled. "My dear child," she said, "you substitute the code of a
gentleman for the Mosaic Law. Of course your good man is a monogamist?"

Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.

"Then there are no 'good' people in the polygamous countries, I suppose!
When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives.
To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman--and a fifth
over--for every man. Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples
there is a derelict like myself, mateless."

Anna's amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony. Her
resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless,
brought forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl. In the
atmosphere in which Harmony had been reared single women were always
presumed to be thus by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those
weaker sisters who had married. Anna, on the contrary, was frankly
a derelict, frankly regretted her maiden condition and railed with
bitterness against her enforced childlessness. The near approach of
Christmas had for years found her morose and resentful. There are, here
and there, such women, essentially mothers but not necessarily wives,
their sole passion that of maternity.

Anna, argumentative and reckless, talked on. She tore away, in her
resentment, every theory of existence the girl had ever known, and
offered her instead an incredible liberty in the name of the freedom of
the individual. Harmony found all her foundations of living shaken, and
though refusing to accept Anna's theories, found her faith in her own
weakened. She sat back, pale and silent, listening, while Anna built up
out of her discontent a new heaven and a new earth, with liberty written
high in its firmament.

When her reckless mood had passed Anna was regretful enough at the
girl's stricken face.

"I'm a fool!" she said contritely. "If Peter had been here he'd have
throttled me. I deserve it. I'm a theorist, pure and simple, and
theorists are the anarchists of society. There's only one comfort about
us--we never live up to our convictions. Now forget all this rot I've
been talking."

Peter brought up the mail that afternoon, a Christmas card or two for
Anna, depressingly early, and a letter from the Big Soprano for Harmony
from Ne