. What she's got to take, you see, is everything under
the sun--that she ever may need!"

With a little soft sigh of finality she sank back into her pillows,
and then struggled up for one brief instant again to add a postscript,
as it were, to her ultimatum. "If my day is over--without ever having
been begun," she said, "why, it's over--without ever having been
begun! And that's all there is to it! But when it comes to Henrietta,"
she mused, "Henrietta's going to have five-inch hair-ribbons--and
everything else--from the very start!"

"Eh?" frowned Edgarton, and started for the door.

"And oh, Father!" called Eve, just as his hand touched the door-knob.
"There's something I want to ask you for Henrietta's sake. It's rather
a delicate question, but after I'm married I suppose I shall have to
save all my delicate questions to--ask John; and John, somehow, has
never seemed to me particularly canny about anything except--geology.
Father!" she asked, "just what is it--that you consider so
particularly obnoxious in--in--young men? Is it their sins?"

"Sins!" jerked her father. "Bah! It's their traits!"

"So?" questioned little Eve Edgarton from her pillows. "So? Such
as--what?"

"Such as the pursuit of woman!" snapped her father. "The love--not of
woman, but of the pursuit of woman! On all sides you see it to-day! On
all sides you hear it--sense it--suffer it! The young man's eternally
jocose sexual appraisement of woman! 'Is she young? Is she pretty?'
And always, eternally, 'Is there any one younger? Is there any one
prettier?' Sins, you ask?" Suddenly now he seemed perfectly willing,
even anxious, to linger and talk. "A sin is nothing, oftener than not,
but a mere accidental, non-considered act! A yellow streak quite as
exterior as the scorch of a sunbeam. And there is no sin existent that
a man may not repent of! And there is no honest repentance, Eve, that
a wise woman cannot make over into a basic foundation for happiness!
But a trait? A congenital tendency? A yellow streak bred in the bone?
Why, Eve! If a man loves, I tell you, not woman, but the pursuit of
woman? So that--wherever he wins--he wastes again? So that indeed at
last, he wins only to waste? Moving eternally--on--on--on from one
ravaged lure to another? Eve! Would I deliver over you--your mother's
reincarnated body--to--to such as that?"

"O--h," said little Eve Edgarton. Her eyes were quite wide with
horror. "How careful I shall have to be with Henr