Audiences laugh when clumsy acrobats fall over tables. So it is fair to assume that the gods laughed at Adelaide. The conversation died once more. And when it was renewed with a last painful effort, it was far less personal. At once, now, Quincy threw himself in it. He careered freely, happily. And in this abandon, his remarks seemed brutal to his sister. It was her turn to be hurt in this pitiful ricochet. Garsted had told him he had a mistress. Quincy gloried in this. He knew all of Garsted’s arguments against Puritan morality. Here was another case of sex gratified in purely psychic channels. The boy launched upon a eulogy of his friend’s free life. “Isn’t he going to marry her?” asked Adelaide. She was gripping herself. She did not mind this open talk with Quincy. Her bringing-up forbade it. And the discrepancy between the tingling pleasure that she felt and the horror that she should have felt, made her insecure. So she gripped herself and gave Quincy rein. Adelaide rode horseback--now that they were rich. A vision flashed across her of her latest mount, galloping in Central Park. She had always felt a similar strange discord between the prim Park and her joy in galloping. But the vision went, without a challenge. “Oh,” her brother was saying, “when he has money enough, if he still loves her, I guess he’ll marry her.” “But suppose, Quincy, suppose he stops loving her!” “Well?” “Don’t you see, how terrible it would be? What could the poor girl do?” The boy looked at his sister. She seemed actually suffering. But the wealth of feeling that flowered in her pain had, as usual, gone wrong. He did not care to have his friend’s course criticized. So he attacked his sister, by extolling his friend’s mistress. “She’s the sort of girl, I suppose,” he answered sharply, “who has other qualifications to recommend her, besides virginity.” Tears came to Adelaide’s eyes. Quincy was contrite. He jumped up and kissed her. But her tears had made her ugly. Her tender little lids were red. Her hair seemed a trifle colorless. She was three years older than he. Why should he be able to make her weep? He despised her for it. This rôle, he disliked more heartily than being bullied. Could he not find a balance somewhere? or a pleasurable subjection? He thought of Rhoda and of Mrs. Deering. And the tenderness of Adelaide seemed cloying.... Soon, Rhoda came in for tea. And there was Adelaide--perversely at the bottom. “Well, have you had a nice long chat?” were her first words. Quincy could not help thinking of her as Mrs. Theodore Cram. Her husband was so important a man. Quincy disliked him so much. And he was so serenely above any feeling, even of dislike, for Quincy. All this hurt. Rhoda was fresh and cool and full as compared to Adelaide, who now looked moist and warm and straggly. The sisters embraced heartily. Quincy got Rhoda’s hand. “You’re getting too old to kiss,” she smiled at him. Previously, perhaps, he had not been old enough?