She rose with a start, and walked to the door to follow his retiring figure through the glass. She stood there, lost in another revery--vague, languorous, half-bright, half-hideous--until the door from the back room was opened, and Samantha’s sharp voice fell on the silence of the little shop. “I ain’t going to set in that poky old kitchen any longer for all the bonnets in your whole place,” she remarked, with determination, advancing to the mirror with the toque on her truculently poised head. “Besides, you said you’d call us when they were all gone.” Lucinda stole up to her sister-employer, and murmured in a side-long whisper: “I couldn’t keep her from listening a little. You talked too loud. She heard what you said about that Boyce chap.” The tidings angered Jessica even more than they alarmed her. With an impulse equally illogical and natural, she frowned at Samantha, and stiffened her fingers claw-wise, with a distinct itching to tear that arrangement of bronze velvet and sage-green feathers from her perfidious sister’s head. Curiously enough, it was the usually aggressive Lucinda who counselled prudence. “If I was you, I’d ask her to stay to dinner,” she said, in the same furtive undertone. “I’ve been talking to her, and I guess she’ll be all right if we make it kind o’ pleasant for her when she comes. But if you rub her the wrong way, she’ll scratch.” Samantha was asked to dinner, and stayed, and later, being offered her choice of three hat-pins with heads of ornamented jet, took two. ***** Reuben walked slowly back to the office, and then sat through a solitary meal at a side-table in the Dearborn House dining-room, although his customary seat was at the long table down the centre, in order that he might think over what he had heard. It is not clear that the isolated fact disclosed to him in the milliner’s shop would, in itself, have been sufficient to awaken in his mind any serious distrust of his partner. As the sexes have different trainings and different spheres, so they have different standards. Men set up the bars, for instance, against a brother who cheats at cards, or divulges what he has heard in his club, or borrows money which he cannot repay, or pockets cigars at feasts when he does not himself smoke. But their courts of ethics do not exercise jurisdiction over sentimental or sexual offences, as a rule. These the male instinct vaguely refers to some other tribunal, which may or may not be in session somewhere else. And this male instinct is not necessarily co-existent with immoral tendencies, or blunted sensibilities, or even indifference: it is the man’s way of looking at it--just as it is his way to cross a muddy street on his toes, while his sisters perform the same feat on their heels.