eila's ghastly fear
lest Mrs. Lorin Boulger, for whom the party was given, should guess I
was in the house, and prevent her husband's giving Wilbour the second
secretaryship because she'd been obliged to spend a night under the same
roof with his mother-in-law!"

Ide continued to drum on his chair-arm with exasperated fingers. "You
don't _know_ that any of the acts you describe are due to the causes you
suppose."

Mrs. Lidcote paused before replying, as if honestly trying to measure
the weight of this argument. Then she said in a low tone: "I know that
Leila was in an agony lest I should come down to dinner the first night.
And it was for me she was afraid, not for herself. Leila is never afraid
for herself."

"But the conclusions you draw are simply preposterous. There are
narrow-minded women everywhere, but the women who were at Leila's knew
perfectly well that their going there would give her a sort of social
sanction, and if they were willing that she should have it, why on earth
should they want to withhold it from you?"

"That's what I told myself a week ago, in this very room, after my first
talk with Susy Suffern." She lifted a misty smile to his anxious eyes.
"That's why I listened to what you said to me the same evening, and why
your arguments half convinced me, and made me think that what had
been possible for Leila might not be impossible for me. If the new
dispensation had come, why not for me as well as for the others? I can't
tell you the flight my imagination took!"

Franklin Ide rose from his seat and crossed the room to a chair near her
sofa-corner. "All I cared about was that it seemed--for the moment--to
be carrying you toward me," he said.

"I cared about that, too. That's why I meant to go away without seeing
you." They gave each other grave look for look. "Because, you see, I
was mistaken," she went on. "We were both mistaken. You say it's
preposterous that the women who didn't object to accepting Leila's
hospitality should have objected to meeting me under her roof. And so it
is; but I begin to understand why. It's simply that society is much too
busy to revise its own judgments. Probably no one in the house with me
stopped to consider that my case and Leila's were identical. They only
remembered that I'd done something which, at the time I did it, was
condemned by society. My case has been passed on and classified: I'm the
woman who has been cut for nearly twenty years. The older people h