“There will be no necessity,” returned Sypher.  “Mrs. Middlemist has ordered its immediate removal.”

That was the end of the board episode.  The next day he had it taken down and chopped into fire-wood, a cart-load of which he sent with his humble compliments to Mrs. Middlemist.  Zora called it a burnt offering.  She found more satisfaction in the blaze that roared up the chimney than she could explain to her mother; perhaps more than she could explain to herself.  Septimus had first taught her the pleasantness of power.  But that was nothing to this.  Anybody, even Emmy, curly-headed baby that she was, could turn poor Septimus into a slave.  For a woman to impose her will upon Clem Sypher, Friend of Humanity, the Colossus of Curemongers, was no such trumpery achievement.

Emmy, when she referred to the matter, expressed the hope that Zora had rubbed it into Clem Sypher.  Zora deprecated the personal bearing of the slang metaphor, but admitted, somewhat grandly, that she had pointed out the error in taste.

“I can’t see, though, why you take all this trouble over Mr. Sypher,” said Emmy.

“I value his friendship,” replied Zora, looking up from a letter she was reading.

This was at breakfast.  When the maid had entered with the post Emmy had gripped the table and watched with hungry eyes, but the only letter that had come for her had been on theatrical business.  Not the one she longed for.  Emmy’s world was out of joint.

“You’ve changed your opinion, my dear, as to the value of men,” she sneered.  “There was a time when you didn’t want to see them or speak to them or have anything to do with them.  Now it seems you can’t get on without them.”

“My dear Emmy,” said Zora calmly, “men as possible lovers and men as staunch friends are two entirely different conceptions.”

Emmy broke a piece of toast viciously.

“I think they’re beasts,” she exclaimed.

“Good heavens!  Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  They are.”

Then, after the quick, frightened glance of the woman who fears she has said too much, she broke into a careless half-laugh.

“They are such liars.  Fawcett promised me a part in his new production and writes to-day to say I can’t have it.”

As Emmy’s professional disappointments had been many, and as Zora in her heart of hearts did not entirely approve of her sister’s musical-comedy career, she tempered her sympathy with philosophic reflections.  She had never taken Emmy seriously.  All her life long Emmy had been the kitten sister, with a kitten’s pretty but unimportant likes, dislikes, habits, occupations, and aspirations.  To regard her as being under the shadow of a woman’s tragedy had never entered her head.  The kitten playing Antigone, Ophelia, or such like distressed heroines, in awful, grim earnest is not a conception that readily occurs even to the most affectionate and imaginative of kitten owners.  Zora accepted Emmy’s explanation of her petulance with a spirit entirely unperturbed, and resumed the perusal of her letter.  It was from the Callenders, who wrote from California.  Zora must visit them on her way round the world.