,"--the smart cabarets that
were forced to organize in the guise of private enterprises to evade
the two o'clock closing law. Peter enjoyed dancing, but he did not as
a usual thing enjoy bankers' wives. He was deliberating on the
possibility of excusing himself gracefully after the theater, on the
plea of having some work to do, and finally decided that his sister's
feelings would be hurt if she realized he was trying to escape the
climax of the hospitality she had provided so carefully.

He gazed at himself intently over the drifts of lather and twisted his
shaving mirror to the most propitious angle from time to time. In the
room across the hall--Eleanor's room, he always called it to
himself--his young niece was singing bits of the Mascagni intermezzo
interspersed with bits of the latest musical comedy, in a rather
uncertain contralto.

"My last girl came from Vassar, and I don't know where to class her."

Peter's mind took up the refrain automatically. "My last girl--" and
began at the beginning of the chorus again. "My last girl came from
Vassar," which brought him by natural stages to the consideration of
the higher education and of Beulah, and a conversation concerning her
that he had had with Jimmie and David the night before.

"She's off her nut," Jimmie said succinctly. "It's not exactly that
there's nobody home," he rapped his curly pate significantly, "but
there's too much of a crowd there. She's not the same old girl at all.
She used to be a good fellow, high-brow propaganda and all. Now she's
got nothing else in her head. What's happened to her?"

"It's what hasn't happened to her that's addled her," David explained.
"It's these highly charged, hypersensitive young women that go to
pieces under the modern pressure. They're the ones that need licking
into shape by all the natural processes."

"By which you mean a drunken husband and a howling family?" Jimmie
suggested.

"Yes, or its polite equivalent."

"That is true, isn't it?" Peter said. "Feminism isn't the answer to
Beulah's problem."

"It is the problem," David said; "she's poisoning herself with it. I
know what I'm talking about. I've seen it happen. My cousin Jack
married a girl with a sister a great deal like Beulah, looks,
temperament, and everything else, though she wasn't half so nice. She
got going the militant pace and couldn't stop herself. I never met her
at a dinner party that she wasn't tackling somebody on the subject of
man's