“That is what is going on among our boys,” I said.  “The Castleman boys, the Chilton boys!  It’s going on in every fraternity house, every ‘prep school’ dormitory in America.  And the parents refuse to know, just as you do!”

“But what could I possibly do, Mrs. Abbott?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Tuis.  What I am going to do is to teach the young girls.”

She whispered, aghast, “You would rob the young girls of their innocence.  Why, with their souls full of these ideas their faces would soon be as hard—­oh, you horrify me!”

“My daughter’s face is not hard,” I said.  “And I taught her.  Stop and think, Mrs. Tuis—­ten thousand blind children every year!  A hundred thousand women under the surgeon’s knife!  Millions of women going to pieces with slowly creeping diseases of which they never hear the names!  I say, let us cry this from the housetops, until every woman knows—­and until every man knows that she knows, and that unless he can prove that he is clean he will lose her!  That is the remedy, Mrs. Tuis!”

Poor dear lady!  I got up and went away, leaving her there, with clenched hands and trembling lips.  I suppose I seemed to her like the mad women who were just then rising up to horrify the respectability of England—­a phenomenon of Nature too portentous to be comprehended, or even to be contemplated, by a gentlewoman of the South!

20.  There came in due course a couple of letters from Douglas van Tuiver.  The one to Aunt Varina, which was shown to me, was vague and cautious—­as if the writer were uncertain how much this worthy lady knew.  He merely mentioned that Sylvia was to be spared every particle of “painful knowledge.”  He would wait in great anxiety, but he would not come, because any change in his plans might set her to questioning.

The letter to Dr. Perrin was not shown to me; but I judged that it must have contained more strenuous injunctions.  Or had Aunt Varina by any chance got up the courage to warn the young doctor against me?  His hints, at any rate, became more pointed.  He desired me to realize how awkward it would be for him, if Sylvia were to learn the truth; it would be impossible to convince Mr. van Tuiver that this knowledge had not come from the physician in charge.

“But, Dr. Perrin,” I objected, “it was I who brought the information to you!  And Mr. van Tuiver knows that I am a radical woman; he would not expect me to be ignorant of such matters.”

“Mrs. Abbott,” was the response, “it is a grave matter to destroy the possibility of happiness of a young married couple.”

However I might dispute his theories, in practice I was doing what he asked.  But each day I was finding the task more difficult; each day it became more apparent that Sylvia was ceasing to believe me.  I realized at last, with a sickening kind of fright, that she knew I was hiding something from her.  Because she knew me, and knew that I would not do such a thing lightly, she was terrified.  She would lie there, gazing at me, with a dumb fear in her eyes—­and I would go on asseverating blindly, like an unsuccessful actor before a jeering audience.