“It does, for I just left her, and she’s a wicked flaunt of womanly happiness.  I tell you, she has been playing with angels, all daintily plumped out, eyes shining, hands soft and white, her neck all round and new, lips red, and her voice low and ecstatic with the miracle of it all.  And ‘Oh, Vina,’ she whispered, ’I almost die to think I might have refused him!  You helped me not to.  He loves me, and oh, he’s so wonderful!’...  I kissed her in an awed way—­and asked about him....  ’Oh, he’s just a nurseryman—­trees, you know, but he lo—­we’re so happy!’...  Oh, Beth,” Vina finished in a lowered voice, “something eternal, something immortal happens, when a man brings love to a thirsting woman!”

“Not tea, but strong tea,” Beth observed.  “Perhaps you think that’s a pretty story—­and perhaps it is,” she added indefinitely.

Vina seemed hardly to hear.  Many matters were revolving in her tired mind, and as soon as she caught a loose end, she allowed words to come, for there was some relief in thinking aloud.

“Hasn’t the world done for us perfectly, Beth?” she demanded finally.  “Everything is arranged for men, to suit men—­it’s a man’s world—­and we’re foreigners.  We’re forced to stand around and mind, before we understand.  If we speak our own language, we’re suspected of sedition.  And then we don’t stand together.  We’re continually looking for some kind male native, and only now and then one of us is lucky....  Hideous and false old shames are inflicted upon us.  We are hungry for many things, but appear shameless, if we say so...  Beth, has it ever occurred to you that we come—­I mean fair and normal women—­we come from a country where there are lots of little children—?”

“The kingdom of heaven, you mean, Vina?”

“Possibly that’s it.  And when we get here we miss them—­want them terribly.  It’s all through us—­like an abstraction.  We know the way better than the natives here, but they have laws which make us dependent upon them for the way....  It has not lifted to an abstraction with our teachers, Beth.  A crude concrete thing to them, a matter of rules broken or not.  We must submit, or remain lonely, reviled foreigners....  Sometimes we discover a native who could bring us back our own, but he’s probably teaching the nearest....”

“We’ve got to stand together, we foreigners,” Beth said laughingly.  “All our different castes must stand together first—­and keep the natives waiting—­until in their very eagerness, they suddenly perceive that we know best——­”

“It’s not for us—­that happy time,” Vina added hopelessly.  “We are the sit-tight, hold-fast pilgrims.  We belong to the clay-and-paint age——­”

“It’s something to see that——­”

“Oh, how truly he sees it!”

“Your Sailor-man, does he see that, too?”

“Has he been seeing other things—­in your studio?” Vina asked hastily.