As Ezra walked home with the diamond bracelet in his pocket, he seemed to feel her cool soft touch still, and the thought came into his mind that Olive never petted him. No, it was he who always petted her. Well, she was very sweet and pretty, and he hoped the bracelet would comfort her. There was no doubt about that. Olive danced for joy when she saw the trinket. She put it on her smooth little wrist and flashed it about in the sunshine. Her eyes rivalled the diamonds for brightness. “Do you like it, Ollie?” “Like it! Why, it’s too lovely for anything, and Madame is just a darling, and she is kind. Just fancy giving me a diamond bracelet! A thing I never dreamt of ever owning. And how shall I ever thank her?” Olive was skipping with joy. Suddenly she stopped short. “Ezra, is this mine, or is it a community-bracelet?” “It is yours, child.” “Mary Winkle can’t come and take it away for the good of my soul, can she?” “No, certainly not. We are allowed to hold private property in such personal trifles, as you know quite well. Besides, Sister Mary would not wish to take from you what you particularly prized.” “Oh, of that I am not at all so sure. If your principles allowed it, I would not give much for Sister Mary’s self-restraint in the matter. She might want the bracelet for herself or for Willette, for what I know. I shall tell her the bracelet is mine even by community-law.” Olive began to skip again. “You are an intractable little mortal, for all you look so soft and yielding,” said Ezra. He could not help smiling at her pretty kittenish ways, but he was filled with a sort of amazement to perceive how impossible it was to change the trend of her mind. Had she been an angular woman, all bones, like Mary Winkle, it would not have seemed so strange. Olive brought her frollicking to a conclusion and looked wisely at her husband, shaking her pretty little head at him. “No, no, Ezra. It is not that, but you are trying to stuff me into a wrong-shaped mould, and I don’t fit. As if any mortal woman ever could care for a community-bracelet!” She danced away to put her treasure in some safe place, and Ezra went off to his work, wondering in his own mind if there was something radically antagonistic to communism in the female nature. If there was any such fundamental incompatibility of temperament, then farewell to all ideas of a successful issue to their experiment. Absolute equality between men and women in position, power, and influence was the key-note of their theories, but what would become of these theories if it should appear that the female mind refused to accept the first and greatest postulate upon which they were all founded? CHAPTER XI. A CHANCE MEETING.