ep warm. What's the matter?"

Wildgoose stepped in with the missing essentials. A full-fed,
round-faced, rubicund man of fifty-odd he looked a perennial
twenty-five. Barbara began to minister to herself.

"Oh, everything's the matter. I told you yesterday that that girl had
run away. Well, I begin to wish she'd run back again."

Miss Walbrook, the elder, had this in common with Miss Henrietta
Towell, that she believed it best for everyone to work out his own
salvation. Barbara had her personal life to live, and while her aunt
would help her to live it, she wouldn't guide her choice. She
continued, therefore, to scan the paper till her niece should say
something more.

She said it, not because she wanted to give information, but because
she was temperamentally outspoken. "I begin to wish there were no men
in the world. If women are men in a higher stage of development, why
didn't men die out, so that we could be rid of them? Isn't that what
we generally get from the survival of the fittest?"

Miss Walbrook's thin, clear smile suggested the edge of a keenly
tempered blade. "I've never said that women were men in a higher stage
of development. I've said that in their parallel states of development
women had advanced a stage beyond men. You may say of every generation
born that women begin where men leave off. I suppose that that's
what's meant by the myth of Eve springing from Adam's side. It was to
be noticed even then, in the prehistoric, in the age that formed the
great legends. Adam was asleep, when Eve as a vital force leaped away
from him. If it wasn't for Eve's vitality the human race would still
be in the Stone Age."

Barbara harked back to what for her was the practical. "Some of us are
in the Stone Age as it is. I'm sure Rash Allerton is as nearly an
elemental as one can be, and still belong to clubs and drive in
motorcars."

Miss Walbrook risked her principles of non-interference so far as to
say: "It's part of our feminine lack of development that we're always
inclined to look back on the elemental with pity, and even with
regret. The woman was never born who didn't have in her something of
Lot's wife."

"Thank you, Aunt Marion. In a way that lets me out. If I'm no weaker
than the rest of my sex----"

"Than many of the rest of your sex."

"Very well, then; than many of the rest of my sex; if I'm no weaker
than that I don't have to lose my self-respect."

"You don't have to lose your self-respect;