“But has she had a chance for choosing a better planet than the one you say she prefers?  Your choice was free.  Was hers?”

“Look here, Lily!  Why on earth are you so significant about a girl you never saw—­scarcely ever heard of—­”

“Dear, I have not told you everything.  I have heard of her—­of her charm, her beauty, her apparent innocence—­yes, her audacity, her popularity with men....  Such things are not unobserved and unreported between your new planet and mine.  Harry Annan is frankly crazy about her, and his sister Alice is scared to death.  Mr. Ogilvy, Mr. Burleson, Clive Gail, dozens of men I know are quite mad about her....  If it was she whom you used as model for the figures in the Byzantine decorations, she is divine—­the loveliest creature to look at!  And I don’t care, Louis; I don’t care a straw one way or the other except that I know you have never bothered with the more or less Innocently irregular gaieties which attract many men of your age and temperament.  And so—­when I hear that you are frequently seen—­”

“Frequently?”

“Is that St. Regis affair the only one?”

“No, of course not.  But, as for my being with her frequently—­”

“Well?”

He was silent for a moment, then, looking up with a laugh: 

“I like her immensely.  Until this moment I didn’t realise how much I do like her—­how pleasant it is to be with a girl who is absolutely fearless, clever, witty, intelligent, and unspoiled.”

“Are there no girls in your own set who conform to this standard?”

“Plenty.  But their very environment and conventional traditions kill them—­make them a nuisance.”

“Louis!”

“That’s more plain truth, which no woman likes.  Will you tell me what girl in your world, who approaches the qualitative standard set by Valerie West, would go about by day or evening with any man except her brother?  Valerie does.  What girl would be fearless enough to ignore the cast-iron fetters of her caste?  Valerie West is a law unto herself—­a law as sweet and good and excellent and as inflexible as any law made by men to restrain women’s liberty, arouse them to unhappy self-consciousness and infect them with suspicion.  Every one of you are the terrified slaves of custom, and you know it.  Most men like it.  I don’t.  I’m no tea drinker, no cruncher of macaroons, no gabbler at receptions, no top-hatted haunter of weddings, no social graduate of the Ecole Turvydrop.  And these places—­if I want to find companionship in any girl of your world—­must frequent.  And I won’t.  And so there you are.”

His sister came up to him and placed her arms around his neck.

“Such—­a—­wrong-headed—­illogical—­boy,” she sighed, kissing him leisurely to punctuate her words. ’"If you marry a girl you love you can have all the roaming and unrestrained companionship you want.  Did that ever occur to you?”

“At that price,” he said, laughing, “I’ll do without it.”