mingly interested other girls and other women
had never interested me, and I took no part in their discussion. And
now the protection of the past that had prevented understanding of
sordid situations and polluting possibilities was being roughly torn
away, and I was seeing that which not only stung and shocked and
sickened, but I was seeing myself as one who after selfish sleep had
been rudely waked.

Head and heart hot, I pushed back upleaping questions, forced down
surging suspicion and tormenting fears, but all the while I was
conscious that in the friendship that was mine and Selwyn's, the
something that was more than friendship, a great gap had opened that
was separating us. If he gave no explanation of his acquaintance
with the girl he had just left, it must be because he could not. He
knew my hatred of mystery, my insistence upon frankness between
friends. Would he come in and talk as freely as he had ever done of
whatever concerned him? Would he tell me--

As I opened the door with my latch-key Bettina bounded inside, and
the light falling on Selwyn's face showed it white and worn.
Something was greatly troubling him.

"Good night." He turned toward the steps without offering his hand.
"It is useless to ask you not to go in such neighborhoods as you were
in this evening, but if you knew what you were doing you would stay
away."

"I know very well what I am doing. I am hardly so stubborn or wilful
as you think. But if it is unwise for me to be in the neighborhood
referred to, is it any less wise--for you?"

"Me?" The inflection in his voice was the eternal difference in a
man's and woman's privileges. "It was not a question of wisdom--my
being where you saw me. It was one of necessity. Moreover, a man
can go where he pleases. A woman can't. No purity of purpose can
overcome the tyranny of convention."

"Convention!" My hands made impatient gesture. "It's the drag-net
of human effort, the shelter within which cowards run to cover. In
its place it has purpose, but its place, for convenience sake, has
been immensely magnified. And why is convention limited to women?"

It was childish--my outburst--and, ashamed of it, I started to go in,
then turned and again looked at Selwyn. Into his face had come
something I could not understand, something that involved our future
friendship, and, frightened, I leaned against the iron railing of the
little porch and gripped it with hands behind my back.