tort could have done. He turned to Edith, rather pointedly
leaving her mother out. "Well," he asked bluntly, "will you go?"

Edith's eyes widened. She looked frightened. She stole a look at her
mother, who had serenely begun upon her embroidery.

"Why, Deane!" laughed the mother, as if tolerantly waving aside a
preposterous proposal, "how absurd! Of course Edith won't go! How could
she? Why should she?"

He made no reply, fearing to let himself express the things
which--disappointed--he was feeling.

Mrs. Lawrence looked up. "If you will just cast your mind back," she
said, her voice remaining pleasant though there was a sting in it now,
"to the way Ruth treated Edith, I think it will come home to you, Deane,
that you are asking a rather absurd thing."

"But Edith says,"--he made a big effort to speak as quietly as she
did--"that that personal part of it is all right with her. She says that
she would really like to go and see Ruth, but doesn't think she can--on
account of society."

Mrs. Lawrence flushed a little at his tone on that last, but she seemed
quite unruffled as she asked: "And you see no point in that?"

He had sat down on the railing of the porch. He leaned back against a
pillar, turning a little away from them as he said with a laugh not free
of bitterness: "I don't believe I quite get this idea about society."
Abruptly he turned back to Mrs. Lawrence. "What is it? A collection of
individuals for mutual benefit and self-protection, I gather. Protection
against what? Their own warmest selves? The most real things in them?"

Mrs. Lawrence colored, though she was smiling composedly enough. Edith
was not smiling. He saw her anxious look over at her mother, as if
expecting her to answer that, and yet--this was what her eyes made him
think--secretly hoping she couldn't.

But Mrs. Lawrence maintained her manner of gracious, rather amused
tolerance with an absurd hot-headedness, perversity, on his part. "Oh,
come now, Deane," she laughed, "we're not going to get into an absurd
discussion, are we?"

"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Lawrence," he retorted sharply, "but I don't
think it an absurd discussion. I don't consider a thing that involves
the happiness of as fine a human being as Ruth Holland an absurd thing
to discuss!"

She laid down her work. "Ruth Holland," she began very quietly, "is a
human being who selfishly--basely--took her own happiness, leaving
misery for others. She outraged society as comple