It had been a tea given by Molly’s publisher in order that she might read her latest poem to the usual scratch lot of people who would hate the poem. Without waiting for a reply, Florence continued: “I acknowledge that Molly snivelled through her nose in high C, and that it was enough to make the gods revolt. But--and this is more to the point, naturally, for I’m a selfish woman and like my ease--it made me feel torn inside by screams I’m too much of an inherited lady to release, that Eva staged her scene as soon as Molly finished hers. I call it beastly selfish of her.” “With both of them,” stated Winnie Conant, “it’s a case of suppressed sex.” My attention attracted by a gaze full upon us, I glanced up. Charles Glidden looked at each of us in turn, between the eyes and not into them; he might have been a surgeon who had operated on these brains and was watching the reactions. For the moment seeing through the lenses of his analytical eyes, it ran through the minds of each of us, I daresay, that it was not a question of what was moral and what was immoral, because what we did was incited by our nerves and not by our emotions. His eyes--which might have had no lids, so immovable were they--seemed to say that men were the poor deluded moths flying head-on into the dazzle of electricity. What I had been about to remark fell into a dead silence; he disconcerted me. But Winnie was of a hardier nature: she asserted that only the surface of Eva Litchfield was vitreous. “Underneath, if she’d only acknowledge it, she’s a human being like the rest of us. But she would die sooner than own up. With Molly, the surface is quite ordinary, while inside--who knows? Therefore, she gives out that she is having one affair after another.” With his smile, which might have been the outward sign of tremendous inner laughter except that it was without human mirth, Glidden said that this was no place for a modest man; and with his cold stare on us he might, in spite of his words of repudiation, have made up his mind to see it through, as he would, without weakening in his purpose of observing stripped emotions, have seen through all conflicts between living organisms from the flea circus to the circus of life. He said: “Do you like to peer and pry into the insides of those whom you call friends? I ask in no spirit of censure. But I’m interested in the workings of the mind of a realist. Why do you realists go the whole way? You may be said to tell all about your hero’s toe nails. It’s so disgusting. Who cares about toe nails? Eva, thank God, is not a realist.” “Her work is almost precious,” Molly criticized. “It’s actual beauty,” Glidden rebuked her. “What is the matter with you women, anyway? Why turn and rend Eva?”