wn life. Every human being has that right."

He helped her into a taxi at the door of the tea shop, giving her rather
more assistance than she required, and then standing bare-headed in
the March wind until the car had moved away. Lily, sitting back in her
corner, was both repelled and thrilled. He was totally unlike the men
she knew, those carefully repressed, conventional clean-cut boys, like
Pink Denslow. He was raw, vigorous and possibly brutal. She did not
quite like him, but she found herself thinking about him a great deal.

The old life was reaching out its friendly, idle hands toward her. The
next day Grace gave a luncheon for her at the house, a gay little affair
of color, chatter and movement. But Lily found herself with little
to say. Her year away had separated her from the small community of
interest that bound the others together, and she wondered, listening to
them in her sitting room later, what they would all talk about when they
had exchanged their bits of gossip, their news of this man and that. It
would all be said so soon. And what then?

Here they were, and here they would always be, their own small circle,
carefully guarded. They belonged together, they and the men who
likewise belonged. Now and then there would be changes. A new man, of
irreproachable family connections would come to live in the city, and
cause a small flurry. Then in time he would be appropriated. Or a girl
would come to visit, and by the same system of appropriation would come
back later, permanently. Always the same faces, the same small talk.
Orchids or violets at luncheons, white or rose or blue or yellow frocks
at dinners and dances. Golf at the country club. Travel, in the Cardew
private car, cut off from fellow travelers who might prove interesting.
Winter at Palm Beach, and a bit of a thrill at seeing moving picture
stars and theatrical celebrities playing on the sand. One never had a
chance to meet them.

And, in quiet intervals, this still house, and grandfather shut away
in his upstairs room, but holding the threads of all their lives as a
spider clutches the diverging filaments of its web.

"Get in on this, Lily," said a clear young voice. "We're talking about
the most interesting men we met in our war work. You ought to have known
a lot of them."

"I knew a lot of men. They were not so very interesting. There was a
little nurse--"

"Men, Lily dear."

"There was one awfully nice boy. He wasn't a soldier, bu