"Why can't you women be frank and say what you think? Mrs. Karner's proposal is better than Mrs. Van Cleave's. She'll make a horrible mistake if she ties up with a lot of millionnaire snobs." "Mabel," Mrs. Karner said solemnly, "let us keep perfectly still and listen to some man-wisdom." In the face of this jibe, Longman had nothing more to say. "Does the lord of creation think," Mrs. Karner went on, "that little Yetta Rayefsky is only deciding whether she'll go to college or not?" "Well, for God's sake, why don't you try to help her instead of making it harder for her?" "Has the philosopher not yet discovered that some things are not decided until one decides them alone? Saint Paul had to go off to Arabia. Yetta's gone to my guest-room. You can help a person pay her rent and, if you've lots of tact and taste and insight, you can help her choose a becoming hat, but you can't help a person to do the brave thing." "That's witty," Longman said sourly. "But I didn't happen to be joking." "When we want to vote, Mabel, the men say we have no sense of humor. But now he accuses me of joking--and apparently," she said after a pause,--"he thinks Yetta doesn't know just how we feel." The subject of their conversation had not lain down, she had curled up in a big chair drawn up before the window, looking out across the Hudson to the setting sun over the Palisades. She was trying desperately to understand the fable of the fox and the grapes after it is turned inside out. The enticing bunch was in easy reach. Were the grapes really sour? It was nearly an hour before they called her, but she had not yet begun to think out what she should say at Carnegie Hall. There is something grotesque about most large public meetings. Very rarely a speaker gets the feeling, at his first glance over the upturned faces, that there is some cohesion in the assembly, some unity. He realizes that they have come together from their various walks of life, their factories and counting-houses, because of some dominant idea. It is then his easy task, if he is anything of an orator, to catch the keynote of the assembly and carry his hearers where he will. It was not such an audience which gathered that night at Carnegie Hall. After Walter had given a quick glance from the door of the dressing-room over the mass on the floor, the circle of boxes, and the packed tiers of balconies, he turned to Mabel. "The people in the boxes," he said, "have come to stare at Yetta, and the rest to stare at them." "Don't tell her that, for goodness' sake," Mabel said. But Yetta saw it herself. For the first time she had a sort of stage-fright as she peeked out at them. The people in the boxes irritated her. She had talked to that kind of women before, and they had only given a few dollars. She wondered how many of them had been to Bryn Mawr.