“Better leave ’em alone,” he admonished her.  “You can’t help—­they’re not your kind.  Don’t you mix into this affair.”

But Deborah did.  She remembered that her sister had once shown quite a talent for amateur theatricals; and to give Laura something to do, Deborah persuaded her to take a dramatic club in her school.  And Laura, rather to Roger’s surprise, became an enthusiast down there.  She worked like a slave at rehearsals, and upon the costumes she spent money with a lavish hand.  Moreover, instead of being annoyed, as Edith was, at Deborah’s prominence in the press, Laura gloried in it, as though this “radical” sister of hers were a distinct social asset among her giddy friends uptown.  For even Laura’s friends, her father learned with astonishment, had acquired quite an appetite for men and women with ideas—­the more “radical,” the better.  But the way Laura used this word at times made Roger’s blood run cold.  She was vivid in her approval of her sister’s whole idea, as a scheme of wholesale motherhood which would give “a perfectly glorious jolt” to the old-fashioned home with its overworked mothers who let their children absorb their days.

“As though having children and bringing them up,” she disdainfully declared, “were something every woman must do, whether she happens to like it or not, at the cost of any real growth of her own!”

And smilingly she hinted at impending radical changes in the whole relation of marriage, of which she was hearing in detail at a series of lectures to young wives, delivered on Thursday mornings in a hotel ball-room.

What the devil was getting into the town?  Roger frowned his deep dislike.  Here was Laura with her chicken’s mind blithely taking her sister’s thoughts and turning them topsy-turvy, to make for herself a view of life which fitted like a white kid glove her small and elegant “menage.”  And although her father had only inklings of it all, he had quite enough to make him irate at this uncanny interplay of influences in his family.  Why couldn’t the girls leave each other alone?

* * * * *

Early in the winter, Edith, too, had entered in.  It had taken Edith just one glance into the bride’s apartment to grasp Laura’s whole scheme of existence.

“Selfish, indulgent and abnormal,” was the way she described it.  She and Bruce were dining with Roger that night.  “I wash my hands of the whole affair,” continued Edith curtly.  “So long as she doesn’t want my help, as she has plainly made me feel, I certainly shan’t stand in her way.”

“You’re absolutely right,” said her father.

“Stick to it,” said Bruce approvingly.

But Edith did not stick to it.  In her case too, as the weeks wore on, those subtle family ties took hold and made her feel the least she could do was “to keep up appearances.”  So she and Bruce dined with the bride and groom, and in turn had them to dinner.  And these dinners, as Bruce confided to Roger, were occasions no man could forget.