“Oh, the schoolgirls is just plain little fools and no doubt has their faces held under the spout for ’em when they get home. But as for the Eastern girls, you hit it when you said they come out here to give human nature a chance. Some girls is born bad, thousands and thousands of them; and reformers might just as well try to grow strawberries in a copper smelter as to make a girl run straight when she is lyin’ awake nights thinkin’ up new ways of bein’ crooked. But the rotten girls in this town are not the whole show. And lots of women that would never think of goin’ wrong--don’t naturally care for that sort of thing a bit--just get their minds so mixed up by too much sudden money, and liberty, and too much high livin’ and too much Europe and too much nothin’ to do, that they just don’t know where they’re at; and it isn’t long either before they get to thinkin’ they’re not the dead swell thing unless they do what the nobility of Europe seems to be doin’ all the time----” “Shucks!” interrupted Ruby, indignantly. “It’s just them stories in the shady mags, and the way our women talk for the sake of effect. There’s bad in America and good in poor old Europe. I’ll bet my new hat on it. Only, over there the good is out of sight under all that sportin’ high life everybody seems to write about. Over here we’ve got a layer of good on top as thick as cream, and every kind of germ swimmin’ round underneath. Lord knows there are plenty of just females in this town, of all towns, but the U. S. is all right because it has such high standards. All sorts of new-fangled notions come and go but them standards never budge. No other country has anything like ’em. Sooner or later we’ll catch up. I’m great on settin’ the right example and I’m dead set on uplift. That’s one reason we’re so strict about our Club membership. Not one of them girls can get in, no matter how good her job or how swell a dresser she is. And they feel it, too, you bet. The line’s drawn like a barbed-wire fence.” “I guess you’re dead right,” admitted Ida. “And my morals ain’t in any danger, believe me. I’ve got other fish to fry. I’ve had love’s young dream and got over it. I’m just about dead sick of that side of life. I’d cut it out and put it down to profit and loss, but you’ve got to manage men every way nature’s kindly provided, and that’s all there is to it.” “My land!” exclaimed Ruby. “If I felt that way about my husband I’d leave him too quick.” “Oh, no, you wouldn’t. You can make up your mind to any old thing. That’s life. And I guess life never holds out both hands full at once. Either, one’s got a knife in it or it’s out of sight altogether.” Ruby snorted with disgust. “Once more I vow I’ll marry none of them. Me for self-respect.” “Now as to Europe,” pursued Ida. “You’re just nothin’ till you’ve been, both as to what you get, and sayin’ you’ve been there----”