I'd see you didn't
kill yourself doing these very things. You just put your feet on the
fender while I get some dry clothes. He says to me, says he: 'Mrs.
Mundy, the one human being she gives no thought to is herself, and
will you please take care of her? She don't understand'"--

"Oh, I do understand!" My voice was wearily protesting. "The one
thing men don't want women to do is to understand. They want us to
be sweet and pretty--and not understand. Selwyn talks as if I were a
child. I am perfectly able to take care of myself."

"Maybe you are, but you don't do it--least-ways, not always. I
promised him I wouldn't let you wear yourself out, and I promised
him--"

"What?"

"That I wouldn't let you go too far. He says you've lost your
patience with people, specially women, who think it's not their
business to bother with things that--that aren't nice, and you're apt
to go to the other extreme and forget how people talk."

"About some things they don't talk enough. Did--did he leave any
message for me?"

Again Mrs. Mundy shook her head. "I think he wanted to talk to you
about something he couldn't send messages about."

CHAPTER XII

Selwyn has been gone two weeks. I have heard nothing from him. I do
not even know where he is.

Yesterday, over the telephone, Kitty reproached me indignantly for not
coming oftener to see her. Each week I try to take lunch or dinner
with her, but there have been weeks when I could not see her, when I
could not get away. Scarborough Square and the Avenue are not mixable,
and just now Scarborough Square is taking all my time.

Daily new demands are being made upon me, new opportunities opening,
new friendships being formed, and though my new friends are very
interesting to me, I hardly think they would be to Kitty. I rarely
speak of them to her.

Miss Hardy, the woman labor inspector for the state, a girl who had
worked in various factories since she was twelve and who had gotten her
education at a night school, where often she fell asleep at her desk, I
find both entertaining and instructing, but Kitty would not care for
her. She wears spectacles, and Kitty has an unyielding antipathy for
women who wear spectacles. Neither would she care for Miss Bayne,
another state employee, a clever, capable woman who is an expert in her
line. It is her business to discover feeble-mindedness, to test school
children, and inmates of institutions to which they have b