proach of a place where men and women are
gathered closely together. But it is a position which, with the
present conditions of tortured conventionality, is impossible,
untenable. Either a woman is the wife of a man, or his mistress; and
if the latter then, as Janet has said, she had better see to her
settlement first and build her romance, if so she chose, upon its
foundations. A man may keep closed the gates of matrimony until the
last moment, but when he finds that only through them can he gain
the woman he loves, then no amount of principle and no desire of
freedom will hinder him from swinging them wide and following her
through. On the other hand also, he will make but little attempt to
unlock those very gates, so long as there is a shadow of the prospect
within his mind that she will meet him outside.

To Sally, such reasoning as this would have robbed her of all
romance--the shattering siege gun that thunders through a town, and
tumbles the images from their altars in the little church.

Two ways there were in which to view the matter truly. If she were
the great woman, she would have loved for the love of love itself--let
it end where it might. If she were the revolutionary seeking truth,
demanding freedom, then she would have loved the transaction for the
transaction's sake--let it end to-morrow if it willed.

But Sally was neither. She took a middle course. She neither loved
wholly for the sake of love, nor could she make her transaction and
be proud of it. Like thousands of other women, she liked to think
that she was loved in return and that it would never end. Like
thousands of other women, she believed that what the man had taken,
that he would keep, because in the eyes of God and all the other
phrases of romantic sentimentalism, they were one.

But this is conventionality, and conventionality has to be thanked
for it. So women have been brought up; and until that army, of which
Sally now is a deserter, has forced its marches and driven its enemy
from the field, women will so continue to think, so continue to act,
so continue to be broken into dust, the grains of which any wind may
carry into the west where the sun sets in deep crimson.

That night when Sally returned from Kew, Traill had noticed her
depression.

"What's Miss Hallard been saying to you?" he asked. "Telling you that
you're leading a terrible life, I suppose."

"No, why should she? Do you think I am, Jack?"

"Me? I should hope not