s. I remember the green earrings she wore that night, and
how they reached down under her heavy black braids--reached down
caressingly over her white neck. She was a strangely, fiercely beautiful
creature, made to love and to be loved, fated for tragic happenings. She
was twenty-nine.

The discussion waxed warm over the eternal question--how shall a woman
satisfy her emotional nature when she has no chance or almost no chance
to marry the man she longs to marry?

Roberta Vallis put forth views that would have frozen old-fashioned
moralists into speechless disapproval--entire freedom of choice and
action for women as well as men, freedom to unite with a mate or
separate from a mate--both sexes to have exactly the same
responsibilities or lack of responsibilities in these sentimental
arrangements.

"No, no! I call that loathsome, abominable," declared Penelope, and the
poet adoringly agreed with her, although his practice had been
notoriously at variance with these professions.

"Suppose a woman finds herself married to some beast of a man," flashed
Roberta, "some worthless drunkard, do you mean to tell me it is her duty
to stick to such a husband, and spoil her whole life?"

To which Penelope, hiding her agitation, said: "I--I am not discussing
that phase of the question. I mean that if a woman is alone in the
world, if she longs for the companionship of a man--the intimate
companionship--"

"Ha, ha, ha!" snickered the poet. I can see his close cropped yellow
beard and his red face wrinkling in merriment at this supposition.

"I hate your Greenwich Village philosophy," stormed Penelope. "You
haven't the courage, the understanding to commit one big splendid sin
that even the angels in heaven might approve, but you fritter away your
souls and spoil your bodies in cheap little sins that are
just--_disgusting!_"

The poet shrivelled under her scorn.

"But--one splendid sin?" he stammered. "That means a woman must go to
her mate, doesn't it?"

"Without marriage? Never! I'll tell you what a woman should do--I'll
tell you what I would do, just to prove that I am not conventional, I
would act on the principle that there is a sacred right God has given to
every woman who is born, a right that not even God Himself can take away
from her, I mean the right to--"

A muffled scream interrupted her, a quick catching of the breath by a
stout lady, a newcomer, who was seated on a divan, I should have judged
this woman to b