Adelaide hardly gave the two women a thought.  She was surprised to find that she was looking at Ross and thinking of him quite calmly and most critically.  His face seemed to her trivial, with a selfishness that more than suggested meanness, the eyes looking out from a mind which habitually entertained ideas not worth a real man’s while.  What was the matter with him—­“or with me?” What is he thinking about?  Why is he looking so mean and petty?  Why had he no longer the least physical attraction for her?  Why did her intense emotions of a few brief weeks ago seem as vague as an unimportant occurrence of many years ago?  What had broken the spell?  She could not answer her own puzzled questions; she simply knew that it was so, that any idea that she did, or ever could, love Ross Whitney was gone, and gone forever.  “It’s so,” she thought.  “What’s the difference why?  Shall I never learn to let the stove doors alone?”

As soon as lunch was over Matilda took Ellen to her boudoir and Ross went away, leaving Janet and Adelaide to walk up and down the shaded west terrace with its vast outlook upon the sinuous river and the hills.  To draw Janet from the painful theatricals, she took advantage of a casual question about the lynching, and went into the details of that red evening as she had not with anyone.  It was now almost two months into the past; but all Saint X was still feverish from it, and she herself had only begun again to have unhaunted and unbroken sleep.  While she was relating Janet forgot herself; but when the story was told—­all of it except Adelaide’s own part; that she entirely omitted—­Janet went back to her personal point of view.  “A beautiful love story!” she exclaimed.  “And right here in prosaic Saint X!”

“Is it Saint X that is prosaic,” said Adelaide, “or is it we, in failing to see the truth about familiar things?”

“Perhaps,” replied Janet, in the tone that means “not at all.”  To her a thrill of emotion or a throb of pain felt by a titled person differed from the same sensation in an untitled person as a bar of supernal or infernal music differs from the whistling of a farm boy on his way to gather the eggs; if the title was royal—­Janet wept when an empress died of a cancer and talked of her “heroism” for weeks.

“Of course,” she went on musingly, to Adelaide, “it was very beautiful for Lorry and Estelle to love each other.  Still, I can’t help feeling that—­At least, I can understand Arden Wilmot’s rage.  After all, Estelle stepped out of her class; didn’t she, Del?”

“Yes,” said Del, not recognizing the remark as one she herself might have made not many months before.  “Both she and Lorry stepped out of their classes, and into the class where there is no class, but only just men and women, hearts and hands and brains.”  She checked herself just in time to refrain from adding, “the class our fathers and mothers belonged in.”

Janet did not inquire into the mystery of this.  “And Estelle has gone to live with poor Lorry’s mother!” said she.  “How noble and touching!  Such beautiful self-sacrifice!”