“How can you?” Fanny cried; “oh, how can you? It is too wicked, all too horrible, for words. I don't think you are advanced or superior, Claire, you failed him and yourself both. It's perfectly amazing to me, after the men you have met, that you don't know them. You must keep them going in the right direction; you can't let them stop, or look around, once; I only learned that lately, but it is so. They haven't an idea of what they want, and they try everything. Then if you let a man go he is the first to blame you; it's like winking at murder.” “How could I keep him when he didn't want to stay?” Claire asked wearily; “I am not too moral, but I couldn't quite manage that. Then what you say might do for some men, but not Peyton. You see, he has always been very pure; all his friends at Princeton were like that; they were proud of it and very severe on the other. And afterwards, when he went into the city, it was the same; Peyton would get drunk any number of times with any number of men, but, as he said, he was off women. The stage door, it seems, is very old-fashioned now. “When we were engaged, and he told me that he was really pure, I was simply mad with happiness. I thought it was such a marvelous thing for a girl to find. I still think that; and yet, I don't know. If he were different, had had more experience, perhaps this wouldn't have hit him so hard. He would have kissed his Mina on the porch, outside the dance, and come home.” “As for that Raff woman--” Fanny stopped, at a loss for a term to express her disgust. “Why not?” Claire asked. “She wanted Peyton and went after him: he isn't for her art, I believe, but for herself. I haven't talked to her; I can't make up my mind about that. Probably it would do no good. Peyton is splendidly healthy; it won't be necessary to tell her anything about draughts and stomach bands.” “Claire, you're utterly, tragically wrong,” Fanny wailed. “I wish I could shake sense into you. Up to a point this is your fault; you are behaving in a criminally foolish way.” “What do you think Claire should do?” Lee asked his wife. She turned to him, a flood of speech on her lips; but, suddenly, she suppressed it; the expression, the lines, of concern were banished from her face. “There is so much,” she replied equably; “they haven't discussed it enough; why, it ought to take a year, two, before they reached such a decision. Peyton can't know his mind, nor Claire hers. And Ira, that darling innocent little child.” “Damn Ira!” Claire Morris exclaimed. “You mustn't,” Fanny asserted; “you're not yourself. Mina Raff should be burned alive, something terrible done to her.” Fanny's voice had the hard cold edge of fanatical conviction. “If she had come into my house making trouble.... But that couldn't have happened; I'd have known at once.”