Harmony was now a woman.

Anna would have cut off her hand sooner than have brought the girl to harm; but she loved to generalize.  It amused her to see Harmony’s eyes widen with horror at one of her radical beliefs.  Nothing pleased her more than to pit her individualism against the girl’s rigid and conventional morality, and down her by some apparently unanswerable argument.

On the day after the incident in the kitchen such an argument took place—­hardly an argument, for Harmony knew nothing of mental fencing.  Anna had taken a heavy cold, and remained at home.  Harmony had been practicing, and at the end she played a little winter song by some modern composer.  It breathed all the purity of a white winter’s day; it was as chaste as ice and as cold; and yet throughout was the thought of green things hiding beneath the snow and the hope of spring.

Harmony, having finished, voiced some such feeling.  She was rather ashamed of her thought.

“It seems that way to me,” she finished apologetically.  “It sounds rather silly.  I always think I can tell the sort of person who composes certain things.”

“And this gentleman who writes of winter?”

“I think he is very reserved.  And that he has never loved any one.”

“Indeed!”

“When there is any love in music, any heart, one always feels it, exactly as in books—­the difference between a love story and—­and—­”

“—­a dictionary !”

“You always laugh,” Harmony complained

“That’s better than weeping.  When I think of the rotten way things go in this world I want to weep always.”

“I don’t find it a bad world.  Of course there are bad people, but there are good ones.”

“Where?  Peter and you and I, I suppose.”

“There are plenty of good men.”

“What do you call a good man?”

Harmony hesitated, then went on bravely:—­

“Honorable men.”

Anna smiled.  “My dear child,” she said, “you substitute the code of a gentleman for the Mosaic Law.  Of course your good man is a monogamist?”

Harmony nodded, puzzled eyes on Anna.

“Then there are no ‘good’ people in the polygamous countries, I suppose!  When there were twelve women to every man, a man took a dozen wives.  To-day in our part of the globe there is one woman—­and a fifth over—­for every man.  Each man gets one woman, and for every five couples there is a derelict like myself, mateless.”

Anna’s amazing frankness about herself often confused Harmony.  Her resentment at her single condition, because it left her childless, brought forth theories that shocked and alarmed the girl.  In the atmosphere in which Harmony had been reared single women were always presumed to be thus by choice and to regard with certain tolerance those weaker sisters who had married.  Anna, on the contrary, was frankly a derelict, frankly regretted her maiden condition and railed with bitterness against her enforced childlessness.  The near approach of Christmas had for years found her morose and resentful.  There are, here and there, such women, essentially mothers but not necessarily wives, their sole passion that of maternity.