is that Ross is more like the flabby things—­his environment dominates him, while Dory dominates his environment.  But you like the Ross sort, and you’re right to suit yourself.  To suit yourself is the only way to avoid making a complete failure of life.  Wait till Dory comes home.  Then talk it out with him.  Then—­free yourself and marry Ross, who will have freed himself.  It’s quite simple.  People are broad-minded about divorce nowadays.  It never causes serious scandal, except among those who’d like to do the same, but don’t dare.”

It certainly was easy, and ought to have been attractive.  Yet Del was not attracted.  “One can’t deal with love in such a cold, calculating fashion,” thought she, by way of bolstering up her weakening confidence in the reality and depth of those sensations which had seemed so thrillingly romantic an hour before.  “I’ve given you the impression that Ross and I have some—­some understanding,” said she.  “But we haven’t.  For all I know, he may not care for me as I care for him.”

“He probably doesn’t,” was Madelene’s douche-like reply.  “You attract him physically—­which includes his feeling that you’d show off better than Theresa before the world for which he cares so much.  But, after all, that’s much the way you care for him, isn’t it?”

Adelaide’s bosom was swelling and falling agitatedly.  Her eyes flashed; her reserve vanished.  “I’m sure he’d love me!” cried she.  “He’d give me what my whole soul, my whole body cry out for.  Madelene, you don’t understand!  I am so starved, so out in the cold!  I want to go in where it’s warm—­and—­human!” The truth, the deep-down truth, was out at last; Adelaide had wrenched it from herself.

“And Dory will not give you that?” said Madelene, all gentleness and sympathy, and treading softly on this dangerous, delicate ground.

“He gives me nothing!” exclaimed Adelaide bitterly.  “He is waiting for me to learn to love him.  He ought to know that a woman has to be taught to love—­at least the sort of woman I am.  He treats me as if I were his equal, when he ought to see that I’m not; that I’m like a child, and have to be shown what’s good for me, and made to take it.”

“Then, perhaps, after all,” said Madelene slowly, “you do care for Dory.”

“Of course I care for him; how could anyone help it?  But he won’t let me—­he won’t let me!” She was on the verge of hysteria, and her loss of self-control was aggravated by the feeling that she was making a weak, silly exhibition of herself.

“If you do care for Dory, and Dory cares for you, and you don’t care for Ross—­” began Madelene.

“But I do care for Ross, too!  Oh, I must be bad—­bad!  Could a nice woman care for two men at the same time?”

“I’d have said not,” was Madelene’s answer.  “But now I see that she could—­and I see why.”

“Dory means something to me that Ross does not.  Ross means something that Dory does not.  I want it all—­all that both of them represent.  I can’t give up Dory; I can’t give up Ross.  You don’t understand, Madelene, because you’ve had the good luck to get it all from Arthur.”