lame her? If she found
for the present enough of content in the soft sunshine, the fragrant
flowers, her baby, and her own home, with the intermittent companionship
of the one man she had chosen to spend her life with, shall we consider
her highly culpable, deficient in the moral or social sense? All the
rest was much ado about nothing to Adelle, and, perhaps, as far as
Bellevue went,--and a good deal like it in life elsewhere,--Adelle was
not far wrong in her instinct....

"Here's Archie now," she remarked, observing her lord coming up the
drive in his car.

"Hello, Archie!" Irene called in greeting. Her tone was quite friendly
and intimate. Archie certainly had been "accepted" in this quarter.
"Going to the Carharts?"

Archie, of course, was going to the Carharts to dine and play cards.

"Coming, Dell?" he asked his wife casually.

Adelle shook her head.

"I've been telling Dell she ought not to be so lazy," Irene commented.
"She never goes off the place if she can help it!"

"Adelle don't like people," Archie observed gloomily.

"Yes I do, well enough," his wife protested.

"It's a queer way you have of showing it, then."

"Why should I like 'em, anyway, if I don't want to?" she retorted with
some heat, childishly eager to put herself in the right.

"That's just it," Irene commented. "I tell her some day she will want
people, and she will find it isn't easy to have them then.... Besides,
it's her duty to take her part--everybody must."

Adelle made a bored gesture and filched a cigarette from Archie's case.

"Go on, you two, and have a good time," she said amiably.

And presently Archie departed with Irene, driving her back to Bellevue
in his own car. As Adelle watched them depart from the veranda, very
companionably, in close conversation, she smiled, perhaps because she
knew that they were still talking about her and her social delinquency,
perhaps because it amused her to think how thoroughly Irene had revised
her opinion of the "red-headed bounder." In the still twilight her quiet
mind speculated upon many things--the friendship between Archie and
Irene, the obsession most people seemed to have to get together in one
way or another, Irene's creed of "taking your place in the
world,"--possibly even the purpose and meaning of life in general,
although Adelle would scarcely recognize her meditations under those
terms.... In the end she went up softly to her baby's room and spent a
long time in exami