any woman. He
can believe in a woman, and that's the first thing that's needed to
make a woman like her, true. I don't envy his job." He was speaking
self-contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogically, as a man thinks. He
went on in that way, getting himself all out. "She isn't single-hearted,
but she's faithful. She'll never betray him now. She's never given him
any reason to distrust her. She's the kind that can keep on straight
with any one she's begun straight with. She told him all that before me
be cause she wanted me to know--to realize--that she had told him. It
took courage."

Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she seized a single point.
"Perhaps not so much courage as you think. You mustn't let such bravado
impose upon you, Philip. I've no doubt she knew her ground."

"She took the chance of his casting her off."

"She knew he wouldn't. She knew him, and she knew you. She knew that if
he cast her off--"

"Mother! Don't say it! I can't bear it!"

His mother did not say it, or anything more, then. Late at night she
came to him. "Are you asleep, Philip?"

"Asleep? I!"

"I didn't suppose you were. But I have had a note to-day which I must
answer. Mrs. Andrews has asked us to dinner on Saturday. Philip, if you
could see that sweet girl as I do, in all her goodness and sincerity--"

"I think I do, mother. And I wouldn't be guilty of her unhappiness for
the world. You must decline."

"Well, perhaps you are right." Mrs. Verrian went away, softly, sighing.
As she sealed her reply to Mrs. Andrews, she sighed again, and made the
reflection which a mother seldom makes with regard to her son, before
his marriage, that men do not love women for their goodness.

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Almost incomparably ignorant woman
Almost to die of hunger for something to happen
Belief of immortality--without one jot of evidence
Brave in the right time and place
Continuity becomes the instinctive expectation
Found her too frankly disputatious
Girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could
If there's wrong done the penalty doesn't right it
Never wanted a holiday so much as the day after you had one
Personal view of all things and all persons which women take
Proof against the stupidest praise
Read too many stories to care for the plot
She laughed too much and too loud
Sick people are terribly, egotistical
The fad that fails is extinguished forever