"And of course they like you accordingly. Well, who cares? You didn't have to regard them--before, so why regard them now? They'll come around, Stephanie, never fear. If you make the pace as hot as you seem to have made it this afternoon, they'll be along in full cry shortly. Wait until some of their men folks have had _their_ say--there will likely be another thought coming to them then. I've great faith in the men--they prevent us from becoming cats." A groom rode up leading a spanking bay mare. Touching his hat he dismounted. Miss Chamberlain swung up lightly astride and gathered the reins. "Until to-morrow morning then--at eleven?" she asked. "Whenever it suits you," Stephanie smiled. "I'll be there on the dot," said Gladys--and with a little laugh and a nod she rode away. Stephanie continued her drive homeward. The way was pleasanter now--she was not alone--Gladys would stand by her--and with Gladys would come others of her old intimates. The first was the hardest--the rest would follow in time, depending on the independence of the individual and the extent and force of the opposition. It might take a year for her to be rehabilitated--for Society to white-wash her or to forget--or it might take only a month. At all events, she was going to try it. She would rather enjoy the struggle--enjoy fighting those who were opposed. She always had despised the conventional ones--those who were afraid--those whose God was Society's good opinion, and who worshipped at the altar of commonplaceness and custom. True she was a false wife, branded so all could see; but she knew that, except for the brand, she was not alone. She was in good company; only, the others were ostensibly regular, while she had broken over and had left no room for doubt nor for exercise of a discretionary blindness. She had been honest about it--she had gone away never to come back, she thought. She had staked herself openly and unreservedly before the whole world, with the intention never to seek for restitution. The others staked nothing unless found out--they broke the seventh commandment with impunity, but discreetly and with due regard for the conventions. And the very ones who were breaking, or had broken it, would be the most frigid to her now. She smiled a bit sarcastically. It was the way of the world, and she knew it years ago, so she had nothing to cry over. They also were doing the conventional and the proper--and looking out for themselves. When she had melted the ice around her sufficiently for them to sail up to her without endangering their own crafts in the floe, they would come promptly and with dispatch. Until then she was aware they would hold off. When she arrived at home a limousine was standing before the door. Her mother was entertaining a visitor in the piazza-room, and she passed on upstairs.