She had had it out with Neville one stormy afternoon in January, stopping in for tea after posing for John Burleson’s Psyche fountain ordered by Penrhyn Cardemon.  She had demanded from Neville acquiescence in her perfect freedom of action, absolute independence; had modestly requested non-interference in her business affairs and the liberty to support herself.

“There is no other way, Louis,” she explained very sweetly.  “I do not think I am going to lose any self-respect in giving myself to you—­but there would not be one shred of it left to cover me if I were not as free as you are to make the world pay me fairly for what I give it.”

And, another time, she had said to him:  “It is better not to tell me all about your personal, private, and financial affairs—­better that I do not tell you about mine.  Is it necessary to burst into financial and trivial confidences when one is in love?

“I have an idea that that is what spoils most marriages.  To me there is a certain respectability in reticence when a girl is very much in love.  I would no more open my personal and private archives in all their petty disorder to your inspection than I would let you see me dress—­even if we had been married for hundreds of years.”

[Illustration:  “She began by balancing her check book.”]

And still, on another occasion, when he had fought her for hours in an obstinate determination to make her say she would marry him—­and when, beaten, chagrined, baffled, he had lost his temper, she won him back with her child-like candour and self-control.

“Your logic,” he said, “is unbaked, unmature, unfledged.  It’s squab-logic, I tell you, Valerie; and it is not very easy for me to listen to it.”

“I’m afraid that I am not destined to be entirely easy for you, dear, even with love as the only tie with which to bind you.  The arbitrary laws of a false civilisation are going to impose on you what you think are duties and obligations to me and to yourself—­until I explain them away.  You must come to me in your perplexity, Louis, and give me a chance to remind you of the basic and proven proposition that a girl is born into this world as free as any man, and as responsible to herself and to others; and that her title to her own individuality and independence—­her liberty of mind, her freedom to give and accept, her capability of taking care of herself, her divine right of considering, re-considering, of meeting the world unafraid—­is what really ought to make her lovable.”

He had answered:  “What rotten books have you been reading?” And it annoyed her, particularly when he had asked her whether she expected to overturn, with the squab-logic of twenty years, the formalisms of a civilisation several thousand years old.  He had added: 

“The runways of wild animals became Indian paths; the Indian paths became settlers’ roads, and the roads, in time, city streets.  But it was the instinct of wild creatures that surveyed and laid out the present highways of our reasoning civilisation.  And I tell you, Valerie, that the old ways are the best, for on them is founded every straight highway of modern thought and custom.”