Mrs. Payton's gesture of command was inescapable. Involuntarily Fred's lips closed; when her mother spoke to her in that tone, the childish habit of obedience asserted itself. But it was only for a moment: "Of course you don't mind him," she said; "you are fond of him. But you can't expect me to feel as you do." She drew in her breath with a shiver of disgust. "I love you both just the same!" Mrs. Payton said, emphatically. Frederica was not listening. "Oh, by the way," she said, "I've heard of a little bungalow, at that camp place, Lakeville--you know?--that I can rent for twenty-five dollars a month. I'm going to hire it for next summer--rather ahead of time, but somebody might grab it. I want to have a place to go, when I have two or three days off. I hope you'll come out sometimes. And--and Miss Carter can bring Morty," she ended, with generous intention. Mrs. Payton was silent. She was saying to herself, despairingly, "She's jealous!" "Well, I must go and dress," Frederica said, and got herself out of the room, acutely conscious of her mother's averted face. "'Cheapening' myself--how silly!" she thought, as she closed her own door. When she took her cigarette-case out of her pocket, Miss Graham's words came into her mind and she smiled; but she lighted a cigarette and, standing before her mirror, practised knocking off the ashes. Was it this way? Was it that way? How does the "kid boy" do it? She tried a dozen ways; but she could not remember the entirely unconscious gesture which had pleased Howard Maitland. "How funny and old-fashioned old Miss Graham was! But quite sweet," she thought. It occurred to her, as she took out her hair-pins, that Miss Graham's antiquated ideas did not irritate her, and her mother's did. For a moment she pondered this old puzzle of humanity: "Why are members of your family more provoking than outsiders?" After all, Miss Graham, with her "roses," was just as irrational as Mrs. Payton with her fuss about propriety and "cheapness"--or Arthur Weston, gassing about "relations which are not markedly intellectual." She was angry at him, but that phrase made her giggle. She sat down on the edge of her bed, her brush in her hand, her hair hanging about her shoulders; it had been very interesting, that "cheap" and entirely "intellectual" hour alone with Howard in the darkening flat....