"I'm not asking you to sympathise. I'm just telling you how it is. 'Harry likes this,' says Mrs. Freere. 'He always did.' 'Did he, dear? He tells me he likes the other now,' says Lady Lucy. 'I don't think he's really fond of either of them,' says Isobel. 'Oh yes, my dear. Besides, you must, if you want to do the right thing,' say both of them. I suppose that, when they once get her out of the way, they'll fight it out between themselves." "Will they get her out of the way? It's rather soon to talk about that." "They'll probably both of them be bowled over by some newcomer in a few months, and Isobel go with them--if she hasn't gone already." "Your views are always uncompromising, Sally." "I only wish you'd heard those two women this afternoon. And, in the end, off they all three went together in the motor-car. Going to pick up Harry somewhere!" "Rather too much of a good thing for most men. And it might have been Vivien!" "It's a woman, and one of God's creatures, anyhow," said Sally with some temper. "Yes," the Nun agreed serenely. "And Mrs. Freere's a woman--and so, I presume from your description, is Lady Lucy. And I gather that they have husbands? God's creatures too, we may suppose!" Sally declined the implied challenge to weigh, in the scales of an impartial judgment, the iniquities of the two sexes. Her sympathies, born on the night when she had given shelter to Isobel at the Lion, were with the woman who was fighting for her husband, who had a plain right to him now, though she had used questionable means to get him. If Doris asked her to discern a Nemesis in Isobel's plight--as Belfield had in the fall of his too well admired son--to see Vivien avenged by Mrs. Freere and Lady Lucy, Sally retorted on the philosophic counsel by declaring that Doris, a partisan of Vivien's, lacked human pity for Vivien's successful rival, whose real success seemed now so dubious.