dea of his trouble. He regarded himself
as a congenital Don Juan, from whom his better self shrank at times
with a revulsion of loathing.

Peter felt that he had his feet very firmly on a rather uninspired
earth. He was getting on in the woolen business, which happened to be
the vocation his father had handed down to him. He belonged to an
amusing club, and he still felt himself irrevocably widowed by the
early death of the girl in the photograph he so faithfully cherished.
Eleanor was a very vital interest in his life. It had seemed to him
for a few minutes at the Christmas party that she was no longer the
little girl he had known, that a lovelier, more illusive creature--a
woman--had come to displace her, but when she had flung her arms
around him he had realized that it was still the heart of a child
beating so fondly against his own.

The real trouble with arrogating to ourselves the privileges of
parenthood is that our native instincts are likely to become deflected
by the substitution of the artificial for the natural responsibility.
Both Peter and David had the unconscious feeling that their obligation
to their race was met by their communal interest in Eleanor. Beulah,
of course, sincerely believed that the filling in of an intellectual
concept of life was all that was required of her. Only Jimmie groped
blindly and bewilderedly for his own. Gertrude and Margaret both
understood that they were unnaturally alone in a world where lovers
met and mated, but they, too, hugged to their souls the flattering
unction that they were parents of a sort.

Thus three sets of perfectly suitable and devoted young men and
women, of marriageable age, with dozens of interests and sympathies in
common, and one extraordinarily vital bond, continued to walk side by
side in a state of inhuman preoccupation, their gaze fixed inward
instead of upon one another; and no Divine Power, happening upon the
curious circumstance, believed the matter one for His intervention nor
stooped to take the respective puppets by the back of their
unconscious necks, and so knock their sluggish heads together.

CHAPTER XVI

MARGARET LOUISA'S BIRTHRIGHT

"I am sixteen years and eight months old to-day," Eleanor wrote, "and
I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never
wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and
pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread,
and slept in the