se Italian gardens; no one
shouts or says 'damn.'"

"Ah! you naturally feel out of your element."

Hadria laughed. "It's all very well to take that superior tone. _You_
don't reside on an ordnance map."

There was a pause. Miss Du Prel seemed lost in thought.

"It is this dead silence that oppresses one, this hushed endurance of
the travail of life. How do these women stand it?"

Valeria presently woke up, and admitted that to live in an English
village would drive her out of her mind in a week. "And yet, Valeria,
you have often professed to envy me, because I had what you called a
place in life--as if a place in Craddock Dene were the same thing!"

"It is well that you do not mean all you say."

"Or say all I mean."

Valeria laid her hand on Hadria's with wistful tenderness.

"I don't think anyone will ever quite understand you, Hadria."

"Including perhaps myself. I sometimes fancy that when it became
necessary to provide me with a disposition, the material had run out,
for the moment, nothing being left but a few remnants of other people's
characters; so a living handful of these was taken up, roughly welded
together, and then the mixture was sent whirling into space, to boil and
sputter itself out as best it might."

Miss Du Prel turned to her companion.

"I see that you are incongruously situated, but don't you think that you
may be wrong yourself? Don't you think you may be making a mistake?"

Hadria was emphatic in assent.

"Not only do I think I may be wrong, but I don't see how--unless by pure
chance--I can be anything else. For I can't discover what is right. I
see women all round me actuated by this frenzied sense of duty; I see
them toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their
best years in the business of filling their nurseries; losing their
youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining their husbands, and
clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know that such conduct
is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can't see it. It impresses
me simply as stupid and degrading. And from my narrow little point of
observation, the more I see of life, the more hopelessly involved become
all questions of right and wrong where our confounded sex is concerned."

"Why? Because the standards are changing," asserted Miss Du Prel.

"Because--look, Valeria, our present relation to life is _in itself_ an
injury, an insult--you have never seriously denied that--and how can one
m