Nancy wished that she could have said she liked Mrs. Harter. But, at the moment, she did not feel that she liked Mrs. Harter at all, and apparently some unwonted scruple prevented her from saying that she did. “Oh, Bill, don’t do anything to mess up your life,” she besought him. “You’re so young. It’s so awful to make a mistake right at the beginning.” She was thinking of her own mistake, no doubt. “What sort of mistake do you mean, exactly?” said Bill in his literal way. “Do you mean taking her away from Harter? You see, he says that he wouldn’t divorce her even if we did.” “A great many people, even nowadays, don’t approve of divorced people remarrying. Wouldn’t your own family mind?” “I’m afraid so. My dear old father would be very sorry, I’m afraid.” “Wouldn’t that stop you from doing it?” “Well, no, I can’t honestly say that it would. He’s had his life and run it his own way, and now I must manage mine for myself. It’s a thing about which one has a right to judge for oneself, really and truly.” It seemed to Mrs. Fazackerly--I think quite correctly--that she could do nothing. It was so obvious that Bill Patch saw his own gleam, and that he meant to follow it, whatever his inability to make anybody else share his vision. That Nancy did not share it was superabundantly evident. She said something feebly about the cost to Mrs. Harter of a cap thrown over the windmill and Bill implied, without actually saying so, that the question of reputation was one upon which Mrs. Harter had for some years been devoid of qualms. Mrs. Fazackerly says that she remembered then Leeds and his story about the cocktails, and several other stories of his, too, and she felt that Bill was probably right. But after all, qualms were not altogether to be relegated to nothingness. Captain Patch, with his strange air of a wistful candor that sought her sympathy even while accepting her condemnation, told Mrs. Fazackerly that he fully realized something which he described, in the idiom of his generation, as the “unsportingness” of taking away another man’s wife. “What will you do, then?” again asked Mrs. Fazackerly. “You’re quite right, of course, Bill, it is unsporting, as you call it, and I don’t believe, really, in all the things you see in books about one’s highest duty being to oneself, and it’s wicked to live with people when you’ve stopped loving them, and all that sort of thing.” “I don’t know what books you’re thinking of,” said Bill, presumably speaking as an author. “They can’t be worth much, if that’s the sort of advice they give you.” “That’s what I thought,” said Nancy meekly. “And I knew you didn’t really hold those views yourself, and that’s why I--I can’t understand what’s going to happen next.” “Well, I don’t know that myself,” said Captain Patch. “You see, I’d been pretty sure that Harter would agree to the divorce. And now it seems that he won’t.” “I cannot imagine why you ever thought that he would.”