"I know Arnold, and I know Desire; he is a busy man and she is an indulged woman. She might have entered into his life and interests if she had chosen; the door was as much open as it can be between a man and a woman. I don't claim it is ever easy for them to see clearly into each other's worlds. But they do it, every day. Here is Arnold working himself to death, reducing fractures and removing appendixes, and trying to make the people who swarm to him into whole and healthy men and women. That's a good way to help the world if you do it with every ounce of {73} conscience there is in you. Here is Desire, fiddling with art and literature and civics and economics, and wanting to uplift the masses with Scandinavian dramas and mediaeval art and woman suffrage. If she really wants to enrich life for others, and she says she does, why, in Heaven's name, does n't she hold up Arnold Ackroyd's hands? There is work that is worth while, and it would take more brains and ability than she owns to do it well! It is _her_ work; she chose it; she dedicated herself to it. Now she repudiates it for a whim." "How do you know it is just a whim, Lucretia?" I interrupted rather shame-facedly. "Mightn't it be--er--a very violent attachment?" Lucretia shook her head. "These women nowadays are simply crazy about themselves. Are {74} self-centred people ever capable of great passions?" I made no protest, for I had thought the same thing myself. "When they have dethroned their God and repudiated their families, what is there left to worship and work for but themselves?" she demanded grimly. "Half the women I meet are as mad for incense to their vanity as the men are mad for money." "Lucretia," I said with all the firmness I could muster, "I do not think you ought to allow yourself to take this thing in this way. It is regrettable enough without working yourself up to such a pitch of agony." She looked into the fire as if she had not heard me, and went rapidly on:-- "Sixty years ago, such things were unheard-of; forty years ago, they were a disgrace; twenty years ago, they were {75} questioned; to-day, they are accepted. And yet they say the world advances! With all my troubles, Benjamin, I am just learning why men call death gracious--and my daughter is my teacher. Desire is at the restless age. I have seen a good many women between thirty and forty try to wreck their lives and other people's. You see, the dew is gone from the flowers. They have come to the heat and burden of the day. And they don't like it." "You mean," I said, laboriously trying to follow her glancing thought in my own fashion, "that they miss the drama of early romance, and resent the fact that it has been replaced by the larger drama of responsibility and action?" "That is a fine, sonorous way of putting it," she said bitterly, "but there are more forcible ways." {76} She laughed unpleasantly. I could feel the cruel words trembling on her lips, but she checked herself.