“Oh, of course; I’m sure he will. He’s written me--really beautifully. But it’s a terrible strain on a man’s devotion. I’m not sure that Leila realizes--” Ide sounded again his little reassuring laugh. “I’m not sure that you realize. _They’re_ all right.” It was the very phrase that the young lady in the next seat had applied to the unknown “Leila,” and its recurrence on Ide’s lips flushed Mrs. Lidcote with fresh courage. “I wish I knew just what you mean. The two young women next to me--the ones with the wonderful hats--have been talking in the same way.” “What? About Leila?” “About _a_ Leila; I fancied it might be mine. And about society in general. All their friends seem to be divorced; some of them seem to announce their engagements before they get their decree. One of them--_her_ name was Mabel--as far as I could make out, her husband found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new engagement-ring.” “Well, you see Leila did everything ‘regularly,’ as the French say,” Ide rejoined. “Yes; but are these people in society? The people my neighbours talk about?” He shrugged his shoulders. “It would take an arbitration commission a good many sittings to define the boundaries of society nowadays. But at any rate they’re in New York; and I assure you you’re _not_; you’re farther and farther from it.” “But I’ve been back there several times to see Leila.” She hesitated and looked away from him. Then she brought out slowly: “And I’ve never noticed--the least change--in--in my own case--” “Oh,” he sounded deprecatingly, and she trembled with the fear of having gone too far. But the hour was past when such scruples could restrain her. She must know where she was and where Leila was. “Mrs. Boulger still cuts me,” she brought out with an embarrassed laugh. “Are you sure? You’ve probably cut _her_; if not now, at least in the past. And in a cut if you’re not first you’re nowhere. That’s what keeps up so many quarrels.” The word roused Mrs. Lidcote to a renewed sense of realities. “But the Purshes,” she said--“the Purshes are so strong! There are so many of them, and they all back each other up, just as my husband’s family did. I know what it means to have a clan against one. They’re stronger than any number of separate friends. The Purshes will _never_ forgive Leila for leaving Horace. Why, his mother opposed his marrying her because of--of me. She tried to get Leila to promise that she wouldn’t see me when they went to Europe on their honeymoon. And now she’ll say it was my example.” Her companion, vaguely stroking his beard, mused a moment upon this; then he asked, with seeming irrelevance, “What did Leila say when you wrote that you were coming?” “She said it wasn’t the least necessary, but that I’d better come, because it was the only way to convince me that it wasn’t.” “Well, then, that proves she’s not afraid of the Purshes.”