In December there came a little crash. Late one evening Laura came bursting in upon them in a perfect tantrum, every nerve in her lithe body tense, her full lips visibly quivering, her voice unsteady, and her big black eyes aflame with rage. She was jealous of her husband and "that nasty little cat!" Roger learned no more about it, for Deborah motioned him out of the room. He heard their two voices talk on and on, until Laura's slowly quieted down. Soon afterwards she left the house, and Deborah came in to him. "She's gone home, eh?" asked Roger. "Yes, she has, poor silly child--she said at first she had come here to stay." "By George," he said. "As bad as that?" "Of course it isn't as bad as that!" Deborah cried impatiently. "She just built and built on silly suspicions and let herself get all worked up! I don't see what they're coming to!" For a few moments nothing was said. "It's so unnatural!" she exclaimed. "Men and women weren't _made_ to live like that!" Roger scowled into his paper. "Better leave 'em alone," he admonished her. "You can't help--they're not your kind. Don't you mix into this affair." But Deborah did. She remembered that her sister had once shown quite a talent for amateur theatricals; and to give Laura something to do, Deborah persuaded her to take a dramatic club in her school. And Laura, rather to Roger's surprise, became an enthusiast down there. She worked like a slave at rehearsals, and upon the costumes she spent money with a lavish hand. Moreover, instead of being annoyed, as Edith was, at Deborah's prominence in the press, Laura gloried in it, as though this "radical" sister of hers were a distinct social asset among her giddy friends uptown. For even Laura's friends, her father learned with astonishment, had acquired quite an appetite for men and women with ideas--the more "radical," the better. But the way Laura used this word at times made Roger's blood run cold. She was vivid in her approval of her sister's whole idea, as a scheme of wholesale motherhood which would give "a perfectly glorious jolt" to the old-fashioned home with its overworked mothers who let their children absorb their days. "As though having children and bringing them up," she disdainfully declared, "were something every woman must do, whether she happens to like it or not, at the cost of any real growth of her own!" And smilingly she hinted at impending radical changes in the whole relation of marriage, of which she was hearing in detail at a series of lectures to young wives, delivered on Thursday mornings in a hotel ball-room.