welcome there, not so marked on her
Aunt Elinor's part as on Doyle's, but a welcome. She found approval,
too, where at home she had only suspicion and a solicitude based
on anxiety. She found a clever little circle there, and sometimes a
cultured one; underpaid, disgruntled, but brilliant professors from
the college, a journalist or two, a city councilman, even prosperous
merchants, and now and then strange bearded foreigners who were passing
through the city and who talked brilliantly of the vision of Lenine and
the future of Russia.

She learned that the true League of Nations was not a political
alliance, but a union of all the leveled peoples of the world. She had
no curiosity as to how this leveling was to be brought about. All
she knew was that these brilliant dreamers made her welcome, and that
instead of the dinner chat at home, small personalities, old Anthony's
comments on his food, her father's heavy silence, here was world talk,
vast in its scope, idealistic, intoxicating.

Almost always Louis Akers was there; it pleased her to see how the other
men listened to him, deferred to his views, laughed at his wit. She did
not know the care exercised in selecting the groups she was to meet, the
restraints imposed on them. And she could not know that from her visits
the Doyle establishment was gaining a prestige totally new to it, an
almost respectability.

Because of those small open forums, sometimes noted in the papers, those
innocuous gatherings, it was possible to hold in that very room other
meetings, not open and not innocuous, where practical plans took the
place of discontented yearnings, and where the talk was more often of
fighting than of brotherhood.

She was, by the first of May, frankly infatuated with Louis Akers, yet
with a curious knowledge that what she felt was infatuation only. She
would lie wide-eyed at night and rehearse painfully the weaknesses she
saw so clearly in him. But the next time she saw him she would yield to
his arms, passively but without protest. She did not like his caresses,
but the memory of them thrilled her.

She was following the first uncurbed impulse of her life. Guarded and
more or less isolated from other youth, she had always lived a strong
inner life, purely mental, largely interrogative. She had had strong
childish impulses, sometimes of pure affection, occasionally of sheer
contrariness, but always her impulses had been curbed.

"Do be a little lady," Mademo