"Dan was jubilant." Connie's voice trailed away slowly, and her earnest fine eyes were cloudy. "An engagement," cried Carol, springing up. "No," said Connie slowly, "a blunder." "A blunder," faltered Carol, falling back. "You did it on purpose to make him propose, didn't you?" "Yes, and he proposed, and we were engaged. But it was just a blunder. It was not Dan I wanted. Carol, every woman feels like that at times. She is full of that great magnificent ideal of home, and husband, and little children. It seems the finest thing in the world, the only flawless life. She can't resist it, for the time being. She feels that work is silly, that success is tawdry, that ambition is wicked. It is dangerous, Carol, for if she gets the opportunity, or if she can make the opportunity, she is pretty sure to seize it. I believe that is why so many marriages are unhappy,--girls mistake that natural woman-wish for love, and they get married, and then--shipwreck." Carol sat silent. "Yes," said David sympathetically, "I think you are right. You were lucky to escape." "I knew that evening, that one little evening of our engagement, that having a home and a husband, and even a little child like Julia, would never be enough. Something else had to come first. And it had not come. I went to bed and cried all night, so sorry for Dan for I knew he loved me,--but not sorry enough to make me do him such a cruel injustice. The next morning I told him, and that afternoon I returned to Chicago. "I have thought a whole lot more of my job since then." "But why couldn't you love him?" asked Carol impatiently. "It seems unreasonable, Connie. He is nice enough for anybody, and you were just ripe and ready for it." Connie shrugged her shoulders. "Why didn't you love somebody else besides David?" she asked, and laughed at the quick resentment that flashed to Carol's eyes. "Well," concluded Connie, "God certainly wanted a few old maids to leaven the earth, and I think I have the making for a good leavener. So I write stories, and let other women wash the little Julias' faces," she added, laughing, as Julia, unrecognizably dirty, entered with a soup can full of medicine she had painstakingly concocted to make her daddy well. CHAPTER XX LITERARY MATERIAL Connie wanted to see something out of the ordinary. What was the use of coming to the wild and woolly if one never saw anything wilder than a movie of New York society life, or woollier than miles of properly garbed motorists driving under the guidance of blue-coated policemen as safely and sanely as could be done in Chicago. It was Julia who came to the rescue. She discovered, on a neighbor's porch, and with admirable socialistic tendencies appropriated, a glaring poster, with slim-legged horses balancing themselves in the air, not at all inconveniencing their sunburned riders in varicolored silk shirts. "Look at the horses jump over the moon," she exulted, kissing a scarlet shirt in rapture.