“True,” answered Mr. Lanley.  His heart sank.  It is not easy, he thought, to explain to a person for whom you have just conceived a liking that her son had aspired above his station.  He tapped his long, middle finger on the steering-wheel, just as at directors’ meetings he tapped the table before he spoke, and began, “In a society somewhat artificially formed as ours is, Mrs. Wayne, it has always been my experience that—­” Do what he would, it kept turning into a speech, and the essence of the speech was that while democracy did very well for men, a strictly aristocratic system was the only thing possible for girls—­one’s own girls, of course.  In the dim light he could see that she had pushed all her hair back from her brows.  She was trying to follow him exactly, so exactly that she confused him a little.  He became more general.  “In many ways,” he concluded, “the advantages of character and experience are with the lower classes.”  He had not meant to use the word, but when it slipped out, he did not regret it.

“In all ways,” she answered.

He was not sure he had heard.

“All the advantages?” he said.

“All the advantages of character.”

He had to ask her to explain.  One reason, perhaps, why Mrs. Wayne habitually avoided a direct question was that, when once started, her candor had no bounds.  Now she began to speak.  She spoke more eagerly and more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his speech, that in her mouth such words as “the leisure classes, your sheltered girls,” were terms of the deepest reproach.  He must understand, she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,—­she was as careful not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,—­but she did own to a prejudice—­at least Pete told her it was a prejudice—­

Against what, in Heaven’s name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it came to him.

“Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce?” he said.

Mrs. Wayne looked at him reproachfully.

“Oh, no,” she answered.  “How could you think that?  But what has divorce to do with it?  Your granddaughter hasn’t been divorced.”

A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said coldly: 

“My daughter divorced her first husband.”

“Oh, I did not know.”

“Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours?”

“Against the daughters of the leisure class.”

He was still quite at sea.

“You dislike them?”

“I fear them.”

If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have been more puzzled.  He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips pronouncing them: