“Those are crimes.  I am not talking of the criminal classes, but of the world in which normal people live.”

“Our set,” he laughed, “but that is not the whole world, alas!”

“I know that men—­well bred, cultivated, refined, even honorable men,—­seem to be able to repeat every emotion of life.  A woman scales the heights but once.  Hence it must depend, in the case of women capable of deep love—­on the men whether the relation into which marriage betrays them be decent or indecent.  What I should like to be able to discover is—­what provision does either man or civilization propose to make for the woman whom Fate, in wanton irony, reduces, even in marriage, to the self-considered level of the girl in the street?”

There was amazement—­even a foreboding—­on Shattuck’s face as he paused in his walk, and, for the first time speaking anxiously ejaculated, “I swear I don’t follow you!”

She went on as if she had not been interrupted, as if she had something to say which had to be said, as if she were reasoning it out for herself:  “Take my case.  I don’t claim that it is uncommon.  I do claim that I was not the woman for the situation.  I was an only child.  My father’s marriage had not been happy.  I was brought up by a disappointed man on philosophy and pessimism.”

“Old sceptics, and modern scoffers.  I remember it well.”

“Before I was out of my teens, I had imbibed a mistrust for all emotions.  Perhaps you did not know that?  You may have thought, because they were not all on the outside, that I had none.  My poor father had hoped, with his teachings, to save me from future misery.  He had probably thought to spare me the commonplace sorrows of love.  But he could not.”

“There is one thing, my child, that the passing generation cannot do for its heirs—­live for them—­luckily.  Why, you might as well forbid a rose to blossom by word of mouth, as try to thwart nature in a beautiful healthy woman.”

“It seems to me that to bring up a woman as I was brought up only prepares her to take the distemper the quicker.”

“I do not remember that of you.  But I do know that no woman was ever wooed as hotly as you were—­or ever—­I swear it—­more ardently desired.  No woman ever led a man the chase you led me.  If ever in those days you were as anxious for my love as you have said you were this evening, no one would have guessed it, least of all I.”

“My reason had already taught me that mine was but the common fate of all women:  that life was demanding of me the usual tribute to posterity:  that the sweetness of the emotion was Nature’s trick to make it endurable.  But according to Nature’s eternal plan, my heart could not listen to my head—­it beat so loud when you were by, it could not hear, perhaps.  But there was something of my father’s philosophy left in me, and when I was alone it would speak, and be heard, too.  Even when I believed in you—­because