red a little wearily. "I don't despise you, nor your work.
As for helping you--I dislike lobster, and yet I conscientiously provide
you with it whenever we are where the comestible is served, because I
know you like it."

"Mr. Stoddard," broke in Lydia tragically, "that is frivolous! These are
grave matters, and I thought--oh, I thought certainly--that I was
deserving your good opinion in this charitable work if ever I deserved
such a thing in my life."

"Oh--deserved!" repeated Stoddard, almost impatiently. "No doubt you
deserve a great deal more than my praise; but you know--do you
not?--that people who believe as I do, regard that sort of philanthropy
as a barrier to progress; and, really now, I think you ought to admit
that under such circumstances I have behaved with great friendliness and
self-control."

The words were spoken with something of the old teasing intonation that
had once deluded Lydia Sessions into the faith that she held a relation
of some intimacy to this man. She glanced at him fleetingly; then,
though she felt utterly at sea, made one more desperate effort.

"But I always went first to you when I was raising money for my Uplift
work, and you gave to me more liberally than anybody else. Jerome never
approved of it. Hartley grumbled, or laughed at me, and came reluctantly
to my little dances and receptions. I sometimes felt that I was going
against all my world--except you. I depended upon your approval. I felt
that you were in full sympathy with me here, if nowhere else."

She looked so disproportionately moved by the matter that Stoddard
smiled a little.

"I'm sorry," he said at last. "I see now that I have been taking it for
granted all along that you understood the reservation I held in regard
to this matter."

"You--you should have told me plainly," said Lydia drearily. "It--it
gives me a strange feeling to have depended so entirely on you, and then
to find out that you were thinking of me all the while as Jerome does."

"Have I been?" inquired Stoddard. "As Jerome does? What a passion it
seems to be with folks to classify their friends. People call me a
Socialist, because I am trying to find out what I really do think on
certain economic and social subjects. I doubt that I shall ever bring up
underneath any precise label, and yet some people would think it
egotistical that I insisted upon being a class to myself. I very much
doubt that I hold Mr. Hardwick's opinion exactly in any part