sing their husbands--and letting their
husbands use them--did not frown on the irregularities of their sisters
less fortunately married or not able to find a permanent "leg to pull."
As for the girls--Mildred had observed strange things in the lives of
the girls she knew more or less well nowadays. In fact, all the women,
of all classes and conditions, were engaged in the same mad struggle to
get hold of money to spend upon fun and finery--a struggle matching in
recklessness and resoluteness the struggle of the men down-town for
money for the same purposes. It was curious, this double mania of the
men and the women--the mania to get money, no matter how; the instantly
succeeding mania to get rid of it, no matter how. Looking about her,
Mildred felt that she was peculiar and apart from nearly all the women
she knew. SHE got her money honorably. SHE did not degrade herself,
did not sell herself, did not wheedle or cajole or pretend in the least
degree. She had grown more liberal as her outlook on life had widened
with contact with the New York mind--no, with the mind of the whole
easy-going, luxury-mad, morality-scorning modern world. She still kept
her standard for herself high, and believed in a purity for herself
which she did not exact or expect in her friends. In this respect she
and Cyrilla Brindley were sympathetically alike. No, Mildred was
confident that in no circumstances, in NO circumstances, would she
relax her ideas of what she personally could do and could not do. Not
that she blamed, or judged at all, women who did as she would not; but
she could not, simply could not, however hard she might be driven, do
those things--though she could easily understand how other women did
them in preference to sinking down into the working class or eking out
a frowsy existence in some poor boarding-house. The temptation would
be great. Thank Heaven, it was not teasing her. She would resist it,
of course. But--

What if Stanley Baird should lose interest? What if, after he lost
interest, she should find herself without money, worse of than she had
been when she sold herself into slavery--highly moral and
conventionally correct slavery, but still slavery--to the little
general with the peaked pink-silk nightcap hiding the absence of the
removed toupee--and with the wonderful pink-silk pajamas, gorgeously
monogramed in violet--and the tiny feet and ugly hands--and those
loathsome needle-pointed mustaches and the h