had been discussed and compared,
smiled over and whispered about that season by Society as she and Miss
Schley had been.

For a moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the
strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme
civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider's web of apparently
frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her
world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that
was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there
for her and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth,
money were gossamer to hold the fly. For they concentrated the gaze of
those terrible watchful eyes which govern lives, dominating actions,
even dominating thoughts.

She moved, had always moved, in a maze of complications. She saw them
tiny yet intense, like ants in their hill. They stirred minds, hearts,
as the ants stirred twigs, leaves, blossoms, and carried them to the
hill for their own purposes. In this maze free will was surely lost. The
beautiful woman of the world seems to the world to be a dominant being,
to be imposing the yoke of her will on those around her. But is she
anything but a slave?

Why were she and Miss Schley enemies? Why had they been enemies from the
moment they met? There was perhaps a reason for their hostility now,
a reason in Fritz. But at the beginning what reason had there been?
Civilisation manufactures reasons as the spider manufactures threads,
because it is the deadly enemy of peace--manufactures reasons for all
those thoughts and actions which are destructive of inward and exterior
peace.

For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American
were merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived;
conditions which caused the natural vanity of women to become a
destroying fever, the natural striving of women to please a venomous
battle, the natural desire of women to be loved a fracas, in which
clothes were the armour, modes of hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes,
dyes, powder-puffs the weapons.

What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How
could an angel be natural in it,--be an angel at all?

She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent
desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush
away the spider's web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly?
She did not know; probably