“We are advertised by our loving wives,” he misquoted teasingly.  “I have always observed that the things we approve of in the younger generation are the fruit of seeds we planted.  The things we disapprove of slipped in inadvertedly like weeds.”

The same mail that brought Larry’s letter brought one also to Ted from Madeline Taylor, a letter which made him wriggle a little internally, and pull his forelock, as was his habit when things were a bit perturbing.

Madeline had gone to bed that Sunday night after her meeting with Ted in the woods, full of the happiest kind of anticipations and shy, foolish, impossible dreams.  Her mind told her it was the rankest of nonsense to dream about Ted Holiday, but her heart would do it.  She knew the affair with Ted had begun wrong, but she couldn’t help hoping it would come out beautifully right.  She couldn’t help making believe she had found her prince, a bonny laddie who liked her well enough to play straight with her and to come again to see her.

She meant to try so hard, so very hard, to make herself into the kind of girl he was used to and liked.  She cut out the picture of Tony Holiday that Max Hempel and Dick Carson had studied that day on the train.  She studied it even harder and hid it away among her very special treasures where she could take it out and look at it often and use it as a model.  She even snatched her hitherto precious earrings from their pink cotton resting place and hurled them as far as she could into the night.  She was very sure Tony Holiday did not wear earrings, and she was even surer she had seen Ted’s eyes resting disapprovingly on hers.  The earrings had to go.  They had gone.

The next afternoon she had waited for a while patiently by the brook.  The distant clock struck the half hour, the three quarters, the full hour.  No Ted Holiday.  By this time her patience had long since evaporated and now blazed into blind rage.  Ted had forgotten his promise, if indeed he had ever meant to keep it.  He was with those other girls—­his kind.  Maybe he was laughing at her, telling them how “easy” she had been, how gullible.  No, he wouldn’t!  He would be ashamed to admit he had had anything to do with her.  Men did not boast of their conquest of one kind of girl to another.  She had read enough fiction to know that.

In any case she hated Ted Holiday with a fine fury of resentment.  She wanted to make him suffer, even as she was suffering, though she sensed vaguely that men couldn’t suffer that way.  It was only women who were capable of such fine-drawn torture.  Men went free.

From her rage against her recreant cavalier she went on to rage against life built on a man-made plan for the benefit of man.  Women were hurt, no matter what they did.  Being good wasn’t any use.  You got hurt all the worse if you were good.  It was silly even to try.  It was better to shut your eyes and have a good time.

Pursuing this reasoning brought Madeline Taylor to the sycamore tree that night where Willis Hubbard’s car waited.  She went with Willis, not to please him, not to please herself, but to spite Ted Holiday.  She had hinted to Ted she would do something desperate if he failed her.  She had done something desperate, but it was herself, not Ted, that had been hurt.  She discovered that too late.