“You,” I went on, “are now exactly like the rest of those women in Holy Cross. I suppose it’s all right to look and talk and act that way before people. At least, I’ve no objection if it pleases you. But for heaven’s sake, Edna, don’t spoil our privacy with it. The queen doesn’t wear her coronation robes all the time.” “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said she. “Don’t you?” cried I, laughing. “What a charming fraud you are!” And I seized her in my arms and kissed her. And she seemed to yield and to return my caresses. But I was uncomfortable. She would not drop that new manner. The incident seems trifling enough; perhaps it was trifling. But it stands out in my memory. It marks the change in our relationship. I recall it all distinctly--how she looked, how young and charming and cold, what she was wearing, the delicate simple dress that ought to have made her most alluring to me, yet made me feel as if she were indeed alluring, but not for _me_. A subtle difference there, but abysmal; the difference between the woman who tries to make herself attractive for the sake of her husband and the woman who makes toilets in the conscious or half-conscious longing successfully to prostitute herself to the eyes of the public. I recall every detail of that incident; yet I have only the vaguest recollection of our beginning to occupy separate bedrooms. By that time the feeling of alienation must have grown so strong that I took the radical change in our habits as the matter of course. Many are the women, in all parts of the earth, who have sought to climb into the world of fashion by the broad and apparently easy stairway of charity. But most of them have failed because they were unaware of the secret of that stairway, an unsuspected secret which I shall proceed to point out. It seems, as I have said, a particularly easy stairway--broad, roomy, with invalid steps. It is, in fact, a moving stairway so cunningly contrived that she--it is usually she--who ascends keeps in the same place. She goes up, but at exactly her ascending rate the stairway goes down. She sees other women making apparently no more effort than she ascending rapidly, and presently entering the earthly heaven at the top. Yet there she stands, marking time, moving not one inch upward, and there she will stand until she wearies, relaxes her efforts, and finds herself rapidly descending. But how do the women who ascend accomplish it? I do not know. You must ask them. I only know the cause of the failure of the women who do not ascend. If I knew why the others succeeded I should not tell it. I would not deprive fashionable women of the joy of occupying a difficult height from which they can indulge themselves in the happiness of sneering and spitting down at their lowlier sisters. And I have no sympathy with the aspirations or the humiliations of those lowlier sisters.