“But crazy people are dangerous.  A mosquito can kill a king, and a king has to be careful about mosquitoes.  I’m more afraid of people than I am of insects.  If you could only label them—­”

“People label themselves.  What did Alice Herbert say about me?”

“First, of course, how strange it was that you should care to live in Scarborough Square, especially as you were a person who held yourself so aloof from—­”

“People like her.  I do.  What else did she say?”

“That you met all sorts of people, had all sorts to come and see you.  A trained nurse who is with a sick friend of her aunt’s told her she’d heard you let a—­let a bad woman come in your house.”  Kitty’s voice trailed huskily.  “She said it would ruin you if things like that got out.  I told her it was a lie—­it wasn’t so.”

“It was so.”  I held Kitty’s eyes, horror-filled and unbelieving.  “She stayed with Mrs. Mundy a week.  Yesterday she went away to the mountains—­to die.”

For a moment longer Kitty stared at me, and in her face crept deep and crimson color.  “You mean—­that you let a—­a woman like that come in your house and stay a week?  Mean—­”

For a long time we sat by the fire in Kitty’s sitting-room with its rose-colored hangings, its mellow furnishings, its soft burning logs on their brass andirons, its elusive fragrance of fresh flowers, and unsparingly I told her what all women should know.  In the twilight that of which I talked made pictures come and go that gave her understanding never glimpsed before, and, slipping on her knees, she buried her face, shudderingly, in my lap.

“Is it I, Danny?  Is it women like me who could do something and don’t?” she said, after a long, long while.  “Oh, Danny, is it I?”

[Illustration:  “Is it I, Danny?  Is it women like me who could do something and don’t?”]

“It is all of us.”  My fingers smoothed the beautiful brown hair.  “Every woman of to-day who thinks there’s a halo on her head ought to take it off and look at it.  She wouldn’t see much.  We like halos.  We imagine we deserve them.  And we like the pretty speeches which have spoiled us.  What we need is plain truth, Kitty.  We need to see without confusion.  Sometimes I wonder if we are not the colossal failure of life—­we women who have hardly begun to use the power God put in our hands when He made us the mothers of sons and daughters—­”

“But we’ve only been educated such a little while—­most of us aren’t educated yet.  I’m not.”  Her arms on my knees, Kitty looked up in my face, in hers the dawning light of vision long delayed.  “Men haven’t wanted us to think.  They want to think for us.”

“But ours is the first chance at starting men to thinking right.  Through babyhood and boyhood they are ours.  If all women could understand—­”

“All women haven’t got anything to understand with even if they wanted to understand.  Some who have sense don’t want responsibility.”  Kitty bit her lip.  “I haven’t wanted it.  It’s so much easier not—­not to have it.  And now—­now you’ve put it on me.”