"Oh, very well," said Cornelia, biting her lip. "That’s right, Janet," said Lydia Dyson, grateful for her support. "I’m sorry to disagree with Cornelia. But in this matter, she’s all at sea. Believe it or not, in modern life, love is a commodity for sale, like any other commodity. What else can you expect? Do you know of any other gift in the possession of man, woman or child which is not sold to the highest bidder? Doesn’t a playwright subdue his creative faculty to the requirements of the manager who offers the most royalties? Doesn’t the novelist or the musician or the engineer do the same in his line? How indeed can they help it in a country where everything is bought and sold, where the greed and gluttony of men put everything under the hammer, from a glass of water to a draught of genius? Why marvel that women have to sell their bodies, when poets and artists have to sell their souls?" "Take it from me, Lydia," Cornelia burst in, caustically, "when you apply the oratorical powers of Robert Lloyd to the moral principles of Mazie Ross, the product is hard to beat!" "Cornelia, you wouldn’t say spiteful things like that if you only knew the truth about sex relations. I forgive you because you don’t." "If _I_ only knew!" said Cornelia. She gave a florid operatic laugh. "Do you really suppose I _don’t_ know?" "No woman does who hasn’t been married to a man. Not until she has been chained in wedlock for some time does she see the cloven hoof or feel the mark of the beast, or get her fanciful pictures about love put in a proper perspective. That’s one thing marriage does for a woman." "By your own admission, then," remarked Janet, "Cornelia is right in thinking that the game isn’t worth the candle, isn’t she?" "Dearie," said Lydia, with unction, "ask the most wretched wife on earth, and she’ll answer: ’Tis better to have wed and lost, than never to have wed at all.’" *II* Cornelia, observing that Janet took Claude’s absence with surprising composure, wondered whether it was a case of still waters running deep. It was partly that, but there was another reason. The apparent ease with which Claude had yielded the preference to Marjorie’s claim upon his time carried with it an unflattering implication as regards the value he set upon Janet’s friendship. To be sure, there was the rapturous love letter. But fine words buttered no parsnips; they pleased the ear but they neither explained Claude’s course nor justified it. Thus Janet was as much nettled as disappointed by her lover’s absence. Yet it was not her way to stew in misery. And her control of her feelings was made easier by the pressure of some secretarial work for which she had just been engaged by Howard Madison Grey, the playwright.