"Well, then!" said Jemima with a breath of relief. "You see I believe in being forehanded. Young ladies in society need lots of clothes, don't they?" "You are not exactly young ladies in society." "Not yet. But we mean to be," said Jemima, quietly. Kate winced. She had not forgotten it, the thing her daughter called "society"; the little, cruel, careless, prurient world she had left far behind her and thought well lost. To Jemima it meant balls and beaux and gaiety. To her it meant the faces of women, life-long friends, turned upon her blank and frozen as she walked down a church aisle carrying the child she had named for her lover. Wider, kinder worlds were open to her children, surely, the world of books, of travel, of new acquaintance. But the thing Jemima craved, the simple, trivial, pleasure-filled neighborhood life that made her own girlhood bright to remember--of this she had deprived her children forever. She caught the girl to her in a gesture of protection that was almost fierce. "What does it matter? Haven't you been happy with me, you and Jacqueline? Hasn't your mother been enough for you, my darling?" Jemima submitted to the embrace with a certain distaste. "Of course. Don't be a goose, Mother dear! There'll never be any place I love as well as Storm--" (Kate winced again)--"or anybody I love as well as you. But we've our position in the world to think of, we Kildares," she ended, with the stateliness of a duchess. "The world? Kentucky's a very small part of the world, dear." "It happens to be the part we live in," said Jemima, unanswerably. "And ever since there was a Kentucky, there have been Kildares at the top of it. I do wish," she freed herself gently, "that you wouldn't always feel like embracing me when I've just done my hair! You're as bad as Jacky." "Forgive me," said Kate humbly, releasing her. "So you can't be happy without 'society,' Jemmy? Parties don't always mean pleasure, my little girl." "I know that--" Jemima spoke soberly. "I don't believe I'm going to have a very good time at parties. Jacqueline is. I don't know why--" her voice was quite impersonal. "I'm prettier than she is, really, and lots cleverer, but Jacky gets all the beaux. Even that author man, though you'd think.... Queer, isn't it?" She put her wistful question again: "Mother, do you think it pays to be clever?" Kate, with a pang at the heart for this clear-eyed child of hers, answered as best she could this plaint of clever women since the world began. "Certainly it pays. Clever people usually get what they want." "They get it, yes," mused the girl. "But it doesn't seem to come of its own accord. And things are nicer if they come of their own accord." She gave a faint sigh. "However, we must do what we can. And of course people don't go to parties, or give them, just to have a good time." "No?" murmured Kate. "Why, then?" "To make friends," explained the girl, patiently. "You see Jacky and I have to make our own friends."