They talked—­heavens how they talked!  It was like the breaking up of a log-jam.  The two men would rush along, side by side, in perfect agreement for a while, catching each other’s half expressed ideas, and hurling them forward, and then suddenly they’d meet, head on, in collision over some fundamental difference of opinion, amid a prismatic spray of epigram.  Jane kept up a sort of obbligato to the show, inserting provocative little witticisms here and there, sometimes as Rodney’s ally, sometimes as her husband’s, and luring them, when she could, into the quiet backwaters of metaphysics, where she was more than a match for the two of them.  Jane could juggle Plato, Bergson and William James, with one hand tied behind her.  But when she incautiously ventured out of this domain, as occasionally she did—­when, for example, she confessed herself in favor of a censorship of the drama, she was instantly demolished.

“The state’s got no business with morals,” said Barry.

“That’s the real cause of most of our municipal corruption,” said Rodney.  “A city administration, for instance, is corrupt exactly in ratio to its attempt to be moral.  The more moral issues you import into politics—­gambling, prostitution, Sunday closing, censored movies, and the rest—­the more corrupt and helpless and inefficient your government will be.”  And, between them, for the next half-hour, they kept on demonstrating it until the roar of their heavy artillery fairly drove Jane from her trenches.

But all this was preliminary to the main topic of the evening, which got launched when Rodney seized the advantage of a pause to say: 

“A series of articles on women, eh!  What are you going to do to them?”

With that the topic of feminism was on the carpet and it was never thereafter abandoned.  “Utopia to Brass Tacks,” was the slogan Barry’s chief had provided him with, he said.  We were about the end of the heroic age of the movement, the age of myths and saints and prophecies.  A transition was about due to smaller, more immediate things.  The quality of the leaders would probably change.  The heroines of the last three or four decades, women like Naomi Rutledge Stanton, to take a fine type of them.

“She’s my mother,” said Rose.

Barry Lake’s aplomb was equal to most situations, but it failed him here; for a moment he could only stare.  The contrast between the picture in his mind’s eye, of the plain, square-toed, high-principled and rather pathetic champion of the Cause—­pathetic in the light of what she hoped from it—­facing indifference and ridicule with the calm smile of one who has climbed her mountain and looked into the promised land,—­between that and the lovely, sensitive, sensuous creature he was staring at, was enough to stagger anybody.  He got himself together in a moment, said very simply and gravely how much he admired her and how high a value, he believed, the future would put on her work; then he picked up his sentence where Rose had broken it.