Adelaide smiled as she read this; Theresa’s passion for intimate confession had been the joke of the school.  “Besides,” Adelaide read on, “I think you’ll be especially interested as Ross tells me there was some sort of a boy-and-girl flirtation between you and him.  I don’t see how you could get over it.  Now—­you’ve guessed.  Yes—­we’re engaged, and will probably be married up here in the fall—­Windrift is simply divine then, you know.  And I want you to be my ‘best man.’  The others’ll be Edna and Clarice and Leila and Annette and perhaps Jessie and Anita.  We’re to live in Chicago—­father will give us a house, I’m sure.  And you must come to visit us—­”

It is hardly fair to eavesdrop upon a young woman in such an hour as this of Adelaide’s.  Only those might do so who are willing freely to concede to others that same right to be human which they themselves exercise, whether they will or no, when things happen that smash the veneer of “gentleman” or “lady” like an eggshell under a plowboy’s heel, and penetrate to and roil that unlovely human nature which is in us all.  Criticism is supercilious, even when it is just; so, without criticism, the fact is recorded that Adelaide paced the floor and literally raved in her fury at this double-distilled, double treachery.  The sense that she had lost the man she believed she loved was drowned in the oceanic flood of infuriated vanity.  She raged now against Ross and now against Theresa “She’s marrying him just because she’s full of envy, and can’t bear to see anybody else have anything,” she fumed.  “Theresa couldn’t love anybody but herself.  And he—­he’s marrying her for her money.  She isn’t good to look at; to be in the house with her is to find out how mean and small and vain she is.  It serves me right for being snob enough to have such a friend.  If she hadn’t been immensely rich and surrounded by such beautiful things I’d never have had anything to do with her.  She’s buying him; he’s selling himself.  How vile!”

But the reasons why they were betraying her did not change or mitigate the fact of betrayal; and that fact showed itself to proud, confident Adelaide Ranger in the form of the proposition that she had been jilted, and that all the world, all her world, would soon know it.  Jilted!  She—­Adelaide Ranger—­the all-conqueror—­flung aside, flouted, jilted.  She went back to that last word; it seemed to concentrate all the insult and treason and shame that were heaped upon her.  And she never once thought of the wound to her heart; the fierce fire of vanity seemed to have cauterized it—­if there was a wound.

What could she do to hide her disgrace from her mocking, sneering friends?  For, hide it she must—­must—­must!  And she had not a moment to lose.

A little thought, and she went to the telephone and called up her brother at the Country Club.  When she heard his voice, in fear and fright, demanding what she wanted, she said: