“Sit down,” commanded her hostess.  “If—­what?”

“If nothing.  Just if.  That’s the end of the song.  Don’t you know your Lewis Carroll?

  “I sent a message to the fish,
   I told them, ‘This is what I wish.’ 
   The little fishes of the sea,
   They sent an answer—­”

“I don’t want to know about the fish,” disclaimed Mrs. Willard vehemently.  “I want to know what happened between you and Hal Surtaine.”

“And you the Vice-President of the Poetry Club!” reproached Esme.  “Very well.  He was very proud and—­Oh, I said that before.  But he really was, this time.  He said, ’Our last discussion of the policy of the “Clarion” closed that topic between us.’  Somebody called him away before I could think of anything mean and superior enough to answer, and when he came back—­always supposing he isn’t still hiding in the cellar—­I was no longer present.”

“Then you didn’t give him the message you went for.”

“No.  Didn’t I say I was scared?”

Mrs. Willard excused herself, ostensibly to speak to a maid; in reality to speak to a telephone.  On her return she made a frontal attack:—­

“Norrie, what made you break your engagement to Will Douglas?”

“Why?  Don’t you approve?”

“Did you break it for the same reason that drove you into it?”

“What reason do you think drove me into it?”

“Hal Surtaine.”

“He didn’t!” she denied furiously.

“And you didn’t break it because of him?”

“No!  I broke it because I don’t want to get married,” cried the girl in a rush of words.  “Not to Will Douglas.  Or to—­to anybody.  Why should I?  I don’t want to—­I won’t,” she continued, half laughing, half sobbing, “go and have to bother about running a house and have a lot of babies and lose my pretty figure—­and get fat—­and dowdy—­and slow-poky—­and old.  Look at Molly Vane:  twins already.  She’s a horrible example.  Why do people always have to have children—­”

She stopped, abruptly, herself stricken at the stricken look in the other’s face.  “Oh, Jinny, darling Jinny,” she gasped; “I forgot!  Your baby.  Your little, dead baby!  I’m a fool; a poor little silly fool, chattering of realities that I know nothing about.”

“You will know some day, my dear,” said the other woman, smiling valiantly.  “Don’t deny the greatest reality of all, when it comes.  Are you sure you’re not denying it now?”

The sunbeams crept and sparkled, like light upon ruffled waters, across Esme’s obstinately shaken head.

“Perhaps you couldn’t help hurting him.  But be sure you aren’t hurting yourself, too.”

“That’s the worst of it,” said the girl, with one of her sudden accesses of sweet candor.  “I needn’t have hurt him at all.  I was stupid.”  She paused in her revelation.  “But he was stupider,” she declared vindictively; “so it serves him right.”

“How was he stupider?”