ica knows
anything about. Being the highest type of the good woman she had,
moreover, the privilege which American usage accords to all good women
of being good aggressively. No other good woman in the world enjoys
this right to the same degree, a fact to which we can point with
pride. The good English woman, the good French woman, the good Italian
woman, are obliged by the customs of their countries to direct their
goodness into channels in which it is relatively curbed. The good
American woman, on the other hand, is never so much at home as when
she is on the warpath. Her goodness being the only standard of
goodness which the country accepts she has the right to impose it by
any means she can harness to her purposes. She is the inspiration of
our churches, and the terror of our constituencies. She is behind
state legislatures and federal congresses and presidential cabinets.
They may elude her lofty purposes, falsify her trust, and for a time
hoodwink her with male chicaneries; but they are always afraid of her,
and in the end they do as she commands. Among the coarsely, stupidly,
viciously masculine countries of the world the American Republic is
the single and conspicuous matriarchate, ruled by its good women. Of
these rulers Miss Marion Walbrook was as representative a type as
could be found, high, pure, zealous, intolerant of men's weaknesses,
and with only spiritual immoralities of her own.

Seated in one of her slender upright armchairs she had the
impressiveness of goodness fully conscious of itself. A document she
held in her hand gave her the judicial air of one entitled to pass
sentence.

"I'm sorry, Barbara; but I've some disagreeable news for you."

Barbara woke. "Indeed?"

"I've just come from Augusta Chancellor's. She talked about--that
man."

"What did she say?"

"She said two or three things. One was that she'd met him one day in
the Park when he decidedly wasn't himself."

"Oh, it's hard to say when he's himself and when he isn't. He's what
the French would call _un original_."

"Oh, I don't know about that. The originality of men is commonplace as
it's most novel. This man is on a par with the rest, if you call it
original for him to have a woman in the house."

Barbara feigned languidness. "Well, it is--the way he has her there."

"The way he has her there? What do you mean by that?"

"I mean what I say. There's no one else in the world who would take a
girl under his roof in the way