oung, I
know. You had a bad year with your grandfather and grandmother, and the
reaction has made you wild and careless. But you're not a girl who has
been brought up behind a screen in a room lighted with one candle. You
know what marriage means. There isn't a book you haven't read or a
thing you haven't talked over. And if you imagine that Martin is
content to play Paul to your imitation Virginia, you're wrong. Oh,
Joan, you're dangerously wrong."

Settling into her chair and working her shoulders more comfortably into
the cushion, Joan crossed one leg over the other and lighted another
cigarette. "Go on," she said with a tantalizing smile. "I love to hear
you talk. It's far more interesting than listening to Howard Cannon's
dark prophecies about the day after to-morrow and his gloomy rumblings
about the writing on the wall. You stand for the unemancipated married
woman. Don't you?"

"Yes, I do," said Alice quickly, her eyes gleaming. "I consider that a
girl who lets a man marry her under false pretenses is a cheat."

"A strong word, my dear!"

"But not too strong."

"Wait a minute. Suppose she doesn't love him. What then?"

"Then she oughtn't to have married him."

"Yes, but it may have suited her to marry him."

"Then she should fulfill the bargain honestly and play the game
according to the rules. However modern and civilized people are, they
do that."

Joan shrugged her round white shoulders and flicked her cigarette ash
expertly into the china tray on the spindle-legged table at her elbow.
She was quite unmoved. Alice had always taken it upon herself to
lecture her about individualism--the enthusiastic little thing. "Dear
old girl," she said, "don't you remember that I always make my own
rules?"

"I know you do, but you can't tell me that Martin wants to go by
them--or that he'll be able to remain a knight long, while you're going
by one set and he's keen to go by another? Where will it end?"

"End? But why drag in the end when Martin and I are only at the
beginning?"

Alice sat down again and bent forward and caught up Joan's unoccupied
hand. "Listen, dear," she said with more than characteristic
earnestness. "Last night I went with the Merrills to the Ziegfeld
Follies, and I saw Martin there with a little white-faced girl with red
lips and the golden hair that comes out of a bottle."

"Good old Martin!" said Joan. "The devil you did!"

"Doesn't that give you a jar?"

"Good heavens, no! If y