olutionary lapses, I make no doubt I should fall in love with you,
and then perhaps you would fall in love with me merely because of my own
lack of picturesqueness, and we should live happily ever after."

"What a bore." Isabel sniffed, and moved her gaze to the fire. But she
did not alter her attitude.

"Are you really happy?" asked Gwynne, curiously.

"Of course. So much so that it begins to worry me a little. My
puritanical instincts dictate that I have no right to be quite happy.
What slaves we are to the old poisons in our blood! I live by the light
of my reason, and all is well until one of those mouldy instincts, like
a buried disease germ, raps all round its tomb. Then I feel nothing but
a graveyard of all my ancestors. I don't let them out, and my reason
continues its rule, but they keep me from being--well--entirely happy,
and I resent that."

"I should say it was not the Puritans but your common womanly instincts
that were thumping round their cells. You have no right to be happy
except as Nature intended when she deliberately equipped you, and that
is in making some man happy."

"That is one of those superstitions I am trying to live down while I am
still young. Your mother is unhappy, under all her pride, because she
has outlived youth and beauty and all they meant to her--she made them
her gods, and now they have gone, and she doesn't know which way to
turn. Ennui devours her, and she is too old to turn her brains to
account, too cynical for the average resource of religion, and too
steeped, dyed, solidified, in one kind of womanism to turn at this late
date to any other. But there are so many resources for the woman of
to-day. The poor despised pioneers have done that for us. Of course it
has not killed our natural instincts, and if I had not fallen in love
when I did, no doubt I should still be looking about for an opportunity.
It is my good-fortune that I was delivered so soon. I wish all women
born to enjoy life in its variety could be freed of that terrible burden
of sex as early as I was."

"I suppose you would like to rid men of it too."

"I do not waste any thought on men; so far as I have observed they are
able to take care of themselves."

"A woman incapable of passion is neither more nor less than a failure."

"I have seen so many commonplace women capable of it! Look at Mrs.
Haight and Paula."

"I never look at Mrs. Haight, but as for Mrs. Stone I can quite conceive
that if she had