“Then, my dear Linda, describe him.” “Very straight,” she said, “with beautiful polished shoes and brushed hair.” “You ought to have no trouble finding that. Any number of my friends have one--to open the door and take your things. I might arrange a very satisfactory introduction for everybody concerned--a steady man well on his way to preside over the pantry and table.” “You're not as funny as usual,” Linda decided critically. “That, too, disturbs me,” he replied. “It looks even more unpromising for the near future.” XXI In her room Linda thought, momentarily, of Arnaud Hallet; whatever might have been serious in her attitude toward him dissolved by the lightness of his speech. Dodge Pleydon appealed irresistibly to her deepest feelings. Now her mental confusion was at least clear in that she knew what troubled her. It was not new, it extended even to times before Pleydon had entered her life--the difficulties presented by the term “love.” In her mind it was divided into two or three widely different aspects, phases which she was unable to reconcile. Her mother, in the beginning, had informed her that love was a nuisance. To be happy, a man must love you without any corresponding return; this was necessary to his complete management, the securing of the greatest possible amount of new clothes. It was as far as love should be allowed to enter marriage. But that reality, with a complete expression in shopping, was distant from the immaterial and delicate emotions that in her responded to Pleydon. Linda had been familiar with the materials, the processes, of what, she had been assured, was veritable love since early childhood. Her mother's dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at her mirror, the paint she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hair were for the favor of men. These struggles had absorbed the elder, all the women Linda had encountered, to the exclusion of everything else. This, it seemed, must, from its overwhelming predominance, be the greatest thing in life. There was nothing mysterious about it. You did certain things intelligently, if you had the figure to do them with, for a practical end. The latter, carefully controlled, like an essence of which a drop was delightful and more positively stifling, was as real as the methods of approach. Oatmeal or scented soap! The force of example and association combined to bathe such developments in the sanest light possible, and Linda had every intention of the successful grasping of an easy and necessary luxury. She had, until--vaguely--now, been entirely willing to accept the unescapable conditions of love used as a means or the element of pleasure at parties. Now, however, the unexpected element of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy.