oses the doors of the liberal
professions to its daughters, only to throw them, in the hour of
adversity, into the palsied arms of the roue and the voluptuary.

Like most American girls, Grace had little to learn in regard to life's
fundamentals. She had read all the decadent novelists, from D'Aununzio
to Eleanor Glyn, and the daily newspapers, coupled with whispered
conversations over five-o'clock teas, had speedily shattered what other
illusions had been left over from her school-days. The low moral
standard of the set in which she moved had made her cynical in her
attitude toward the men who courted her. She had a horror of
fortune-hunters, and most of the men who had paid her attention, Prince
Sergius and the rest, she suspected of being after her money. Yet she
must marry some day. She must find a husband, even if she were not to
love him. A married woman is able to take a place in society that is
denied the single woman. Marry she must, but whom? The men she knew
either bored her or disgusted her. He need not be a rich man, for she
had enough for both, yet if a poor man presented himself, she would
certainly put him in the fortune-hunting class. As she had told her
friend, Mrs. Stuart, a man with a proud title would suit her best. There
would be no question of love, of course, only self-interest on both
sides. He would furnish the coronet, she the dollars. It would be the
_mariage de convenance_, with its hypocrisies, its lies, its miseries.

She wondered if her attitude toward life were wrong, if really there
were not a man somewhere whom a woman could respect and admire for his
strength, his bravery, his nobility of character. The old-fashioned
authors--the Dumas, the Scotts, the Bulwer Lyttons, the
Elliots--presented such men as their heroes. Were there no such men left
in the world to-day? Or were the writers of modern fiction right when
they depicted the men of to-day as fortune-hunters, egotistical
coxcombs, conscienceless libertines, deliberate destroyers of women's
virtue? Cynical as the reading of unwholesome books and witnessing
salacious plays had made her, Grace had still a little of the romantic
left in her. She was still healthy-minded enough to find romance more
satisfying than the vulgar realism of the modern risque novel. And as
she lay there in her chair, basking in the warm sunshine, her eyes half
closed, she abandoned herself momentarily to the sensuousness of the
moment.

In her imagination