e was
again thinking what would surely happen the instant Dory found how
matters stood; but she deemed it tactful to keep this thought to herself.
Just then she was called to the telephone. When she came back she found
Adelaide restored to her usual appearance--the fashionable,
light-hearted, beautiful woman, mistress of herself, and seeming as
secure against emotional violence from within as against discourtesy from
without. But she showed how deep was the impression of Madelene's
common-sense analysis of her romance by saying: "A while ago you said
there were only three serious ills, disease and death, but you didn't
name the third. What is it?"

"Dishonor," said Madelene, with a long, steady look at her.

Adelaide paled slightly, but met her sister-in-law's level gaze. "Yes,"
was all she said.

A silence; then Madelene: "Your problem, Del, is simple; is no problem
at all, so far as Dory or Ross's wife is concerned; or the whole outside
world, for that matter. It's purely personal; it's altogether the
problem of bringing pain and shame on yourself. The others'll get over
it; but can you?"

Del made no reply. A moment later Arthur came; after dinner she left
before he did, and so was not alone with Madelene again. Reviewing her
amazing confessions to her sister-in-law, she was both sorry and not
sorry. Her mind was undoubtedly relieved, but at the price of showing to
another her naked soul, and that other a woman--true, an unusual woman,
by profession a confessor, but still a woman. Thenceforth some one other
than herself would know her as she really was--not at all the nice,
delicate lady with instincts as fine as those of the heroines of novels,
who, even at their most realistic, are pictured as fully and grandly
dressed of soul in the solitude of bedroom as in crowded drawing-room. "I
don't care!" concluded Adelaide. "If she, or anyone, thinks the worse of
me for being a human being, it will show either hypocrisy or ignorance of
human nature."

CHAPTER XXV

MAN AND GENTLEMAN

A few evenings later, Del, in a less strained, less despondent frame of
mind, coming home from supper at her mother's, found Estelle Wilmot on
the front veranda talking with Lorry Tague. She had seen this same sight
perhaps half-a-dozen times since Estelle and Arden had come to stop with
her at the Villa d'Orsay. On this particular evening his manner toward
Estelle was no different from what it had been the other times; yet, as