rriage gives it a short circuit. Why
should the current light the lamps when it can strike straight across?
There you are!"

"And poor Joan," said Rose, after a palpable silence, but evenly enough,
"who has thought all along that she was attracting a man by her
intelligence and her understanding, and all that, wakes up to find that
she's been married for her long eyelashes, and her nice voice--and her
pretty ankles. That's a little hard on her, don't you think, if she's
been taking herself seriously?"

"Nine times in ten," he said, "she's fooling herself. She's taken her
own ankles much more seriously than she has her mind. She's capable of
real sacrifices for them--for her sex charm, that is. She'll undergo a
real discipline for it. Intelligence she regards as a gift. She thinks
the witty conversation she's capable of after dinner, on a cocktail and
two glasses of champagne, or the bright letters she can write to a
friend, are real exercises of her mind--real work. But work isn't done
like that. Work's overcoming something that resists; and there's strain
in it, and pain and discouragement."

In her cheeks the red flared up brighter. She smiled again--not her own
smile--one at any rate that was new to her.

"You don't 'solve an intellectual problem' then;" she quoted, "'by
having your hand held, or your eyes kissed?'"

Whereupon he shot a look at her and observed that evidently he wasn't as
much of a pioneer as he thought.

She did not rise to this cast, however. "All right;" she said,
"admitting that her ankles are serious and her mind isn't, what is Joan
going to do about it?"

"It's easier to say what she's not to do," he decided, after hesitating
a moment. "Her fatal mistake will be to despise her ankles without
disciplining her mind. If she will take either one of them seriously, or
both for that matter--it's possible--she'll do very well."

He could, no doubt, have continued on the theme indefinitely, but the
table turned the other way just then and Rose took up an alleged
conversation with the man at her right which lasted until they left the
table and included such topics as indoor golf, woman's suffrage, the new
dances, Bernard Shaw, Campanini and the Progressive party; with a
perfectly appropriate and final comment on each.

Rose didn't care. She was having a wonderful time--a new kind of
wonderful time. No longer gazing, big-eyed like little Cinderella at a
pageant some fairy godmother's whim had