After a silence, Madelene said:  “Well, Del, what are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s sensible!” approved Madelene.  “If Ross really loves you, then, whether he can have you or not, he’ll free himself from Theresa.  He simply couldn’t go on with her.  And if you really care for him, then, when Dory comes home he’ll free you.”

“That ought to be so,” said Adelaide, not seeing the full meaning of Madelene’s last words.  “But it isn’t.  Neither Ross nor I is strong enough.  We’re just ordinary people, the sort that most everybody is and that most everybody despises when they see them or read about them as they really are.  No, he and I will each do the conventional thing.  We’ll go our separate ways “—­contemptuously—­“the easiest ways.  And we’ll regard ourselves as martyrs to duty—­that’s how they put it in the novels, isn’t it?”

“At least,” said Madelene, with a calmness she was far from feeling, “both you and Ross have had your lesson in the consequence of doing things in a hurry.”

“That’s the only way people brought up as we’ve been ever do anything.  If we don’t act on impulse, we don’t act at all; we drift on.”

“Drifting is action, the most decisive kind of action.”  Madelene was again thinking what would surely happen the instant Dory found how matters stood; but she deemed it tactful to keep this thought to herself.  Just then she was called to the telephone.  When she came back she found Adelaide restored to her usual appearance—­the fashionable, light-hearted, beautiful woman, mistress of herself, and seeming as secure against emotional violence from within as against discourtesy from without.  But she showed how deep was the impression of Madelene’s common-sense analysis of her romance by saying:  “A while ago you said there were only three serious ills, disease and death, but you didn’t name the third.  What is it?”

“Dishonor,” said Madelene, with a long, steady look at her.

Adelaide paled slightly, but met her sister-in-law’s level gaze.  “Yes,” was all she said.

A silence; then Madelene:  “Your problem, Del, is simple; is no problem at all, so far as Dory or Ross’s wife is concerned; or the whole outside world, for that matter.  It’s purely personal; it’s altogether the problem of bringing pain and shame on yourself.  The others’ll get over it; but can you?”

Del made no reply.  A moment later Arthur came; after dinner she left before he did, and so was not alone with Madelene again.  Reviewing her amazing confessions to her sister-in-law, she was both sorry and not sorry.  Her mind was undoubtedly relieved, but at the price of showing to another her naked soul, and that other a woman—­true, an unusual woman, by profession a confessor, but still a woman.  Thenceforth some one other than herself would know her as she really was—­not at all the nice, delicate lady with instincts as fine as those of the heroines of novels, who, even at their most realistic, are pictured as fully and grandly dressed of soul in the solitude of bedroom as in crowded drawing-room.  “I don’t care!” concluded Adelaide.  “If she, or anyone, thinks the worse of me for being a human being, it will show either hypocrisy or ignorance of human nature.”