As soon as the banquet was finished, the Egyptian princess had been installed in her high chair, and she held audience with as many men as could crowd around her, and so the women were in a measure left to themselves. They gathered into groups and fell to discussing various subjects. Some told of what they had been doing the evening before, when they were abroad in their spiritual form only. One of them said sadly: “I went to the place where my husband and I always loved to be. I thought perhaps he might be there, for he promised me as I lay dying that on every anniversary of my death he would go there. It was there that we had become engaged, and we were so happy there—” “Did he come?” asked she of the lone curl. “Yes; he did come, but he brought another woman with him, and the very things he used to say to me he said to her. He kissed her and told her that he had never loved anyone as he loved her, for such love comes but once in a lifetime. She is the fifth woman to whom I have heard him say the same things. I wish he would at least seek some other place for his foolishness, for you cannot imagine how foolish it seems to hear a man make love to another woman. He wouldn't be my choice of a man anyhow if I had my life to live over again. It will be a happy day when I get my passport and can leave all these worries behind.” Here was the question of passports again, and yet the newspaper man did not know what it meant. He began to blame himself for remissness in his duty, and to fear that he would find himself outside without having learned it. So he made up his mind that he would ask his host about it the first thing when he should find him again. The second woman took up the conversation and said: “Well, Mary, your lot is not so hard as mine. You had no little children to leave. When I died I went to my old home and hovered over my little children, knowing that they needed a mother’s care, and there sat another woman beside the cradle, and it was she who answered when my baby cried. It was the first time the baby spoke and she called that woman mother.” At this moment the girl with the curl, as the reporter called her, began to complain again, but this time it was about the grave of Charlotte Temple. “Really it wearies me to see what a ridiculous fuss all the lovelorn fools make about her grave. And, she got her passport long ago. Really I think that is paying a premium on weakness. One would think she was the only one to be disappointed in a man. Here come any number of silly things every day and nearly always bring something to put on her slab, which isn’t much, anyhow. Not a word of epitaph, nothing but her name.