She stood breathing deeply, white and strained from his words. In her mind was a racing kaleidoscope: how he first had kissed her, and taught her love; how fearful she had somehow been, and how he had fallen away. In her soul was a sense of guilt. She said nothing: he was gone. She rang the bell. “Delia,” she said to the entering maid, “I have changed my mind. If any one calls this afternoon, I am in.” She threw herself on the chaise-longue and picked up her novel. _The Egoist_ of Meredith. Its crystalline obscurity distressed her. It seemed so far removed from life: so frigidly in diapason between the Sun and the North Pole. She threw the book away and scribbled a sentence on the edge of a newspaper that lay near her hand. “All marriages that turn out monstrously begin as idylls. Indifference at the start is the one defense against horror at the end.” “How I wish I could express myself!” she sighed. She tore off the edge of paper, crumpled it, thrust it in her corsage. Marcia was there. “I met father in the street.” Marcia made no further greeting to her mother. “He seemed in fine fettle.” Speaking she crossed to her own room. She shut the door. Her thought ran: “Papa hasn’t Mamma’s family but he makes up for it in liveliness.” She examined herself in the mirror and took off her hat. “I wonder whether it is a wise thing to confuse marriage and love. I wonder whether the woman must always get the worst of it, like Mamma. Perhaps not. Mamma is the so-called innocent one. Perhaps the rule is that the innocent one, of whatever sex, should get the worst of it. I’ll remember that.” She had dropped her suit on the floor and slipped into a blue _crêpe de chine_ gown that hung straight and square from her shoulders. Within it, her body moved like a still sure mechanism. “Oh, well,” she said, half aloud, throwing herself on her couch and taking a book, “the sins of the parents shall educate the children unto the third and fourth generation.” She remembered her unopened letters on the table near the lamp beside her. She reached for an ivory paper-cutter and began to open them. One of them, from an unknown hand:-- DEAR MISS DUFFIELD: I have something of interest I wish to tell to you, and I must see you alone to do so. Will you have tea with me, say at the _Orange Tea-Pot_, next Wednesday at five? You will catch the reason and the caution implied in the rather unfrequented place. It is not bad, though. I hope to see you, and am, Yours most sincerely, THOMAS RENNARD.