however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down
the gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the
relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a few
admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner opinions a
larger circulation by summing them up in a series of talks at the Van
Sideren studio.

The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on
the fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren's pictures were chiefly
valuable as accessories to the mise en scene which differentiated his
wife's "afternoons" from the blighting functions held in long New York
drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends whiskey-and-soda
instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making
the most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay-figure and an easel
create; and if at times she found the illusion hard to maintain, and
lost courage to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert could paint,
she promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling in some fresh
talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the "artistic" impression. It
was in quest of such aid that she had seized on Westall, coaxing him,
somewhat to his wife's surprise, into a flattered participation in her
fraud. It was vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren circle, that all the
audacities were artistic, and that a teacher who pronounced marriage
immoral was somehow as distinguished as a painter who depicted
purple grass and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were tired of the
conventional color-scheme in art and conduct.

Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of marriage;
she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple. In the early
days of their union she had secretly resented his disinclination to
proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had been inclined to tax
him with moral cowardice, with a failure to live up to the convictions
for which their marriage was supposed to stand. That was in the
first burst of propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her
disobedience into a law. Now she felt differently. She could hardly
account for the change, yet being a woman who never allowed her impulses
to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do so by saying that she did not
care to have the articles of her faith misinterpreted by the vulgar. In
this connection, she was beginning to think that almost every one was
vulgar; certainly the