offered it. My friends say
to me, 'Miller, you are a man, and we need a man. Bainbridge needs a
man.' What am I to do under such circumstances? If there is no man--"

"You might try a woman," said Desire, suddenly losing patience. The
garden party was stupid. The egotist was stupid. She was probably
stupid too, because she knew that a few weeks ago she would have found
both the party and the egotist entertaining. She would have been
delighted to peep in at a window where every-thing was labelled "Big
I." She would have enjoyed Mrs. Burton-Jones' windows immensely--but
now, windows bored her. In the only window that mattered the blinds
were down. Desire's life had narrowed as it broadened. It wasn't life
that she wanted any more--it was the one thing which could have made
life dear.

A great impatience of trivialities came upon her. She hardly heard the
injured tones of the little man who had embarked upon a heated
repudiation of a feminine mayoralty. It did not amuse her even when he
proved logically that women could never be anything because they were
always something else. Instead she looked to Dr. John for rescue, and
Dr. John, most observant of knights, immediately rescued her.

"Did you see that?" asked Mrs. Keene (the same who discovered the
Bolshevik principal). She touched Miss Davis significantly on the arm.

Mary, who had seen perfectly well, looked blank.

"Of course you are not one of us," went on Mrs. Keene. "So you can
scarcely be expected.... Still, living in the same house ... and
knowing the dear professor so well."

"Did you wish to speak to him? He has gone home, I think," said Mary,
innocently. "I fancy he doesn't suffer garden parties gladly."

"No--such a pity! With a wife so young and, if I may say so, so
different. One feels that she has not been brought up amongst us. So
sad. I always say 'Let our young men marry at home.' So sensible. One
knows where one is then, don't you think?"

Mary agreed that, in such a position, one might know where one was.

"And book writing," said Mrs. Keene, "so fatiguing! So liable to occupy
one's attention--to the exclusion of other matters.... The dear
professor.... So bound up in the marvels of the human brain!"

"Not brain, mind," corrected Mary gently. "The professor is a
psychologist."

"Well, of course if you wish to separate them, in a scriptural sense.
But what I mean is that such biological studies are dangerous. So
absorbing. When one examine