So Marjorie Benton played for money. She had not in the least intended to, but she was too embarrassed to utter a protest. She played, and with a mind perturbed, of course, played badly. At the end of the afternoon she had lost sixty dollars. Her cheeks burned as she made out her check and laid it on the table. All the way home as she sat comfortably in her limousine she thought of it. It wasn’t the money—sixty dollars meant nothing to Marjorie Benton—she would have felt precisely the same had she won. It was the principle of the thing that worried her—she felt utterly debased to think that she had spent an afternoon _gambling_. She couldn’t imagine just why it should affect her that way, unless it was her puritanical upbringing that arose to the surface, despite all her efforts to force it back. When she told Hugh about it, he laughed, and called her a “little old-fashioned country girl.” “Have you forgotten about ‘living in Rome,’ honey?” he said lightly. “Don’t let it upset you. You’ll get used to it!” But Marjorie knew better. There was only one thing to do. So never again did she play bridge. Bridge bored her, she insisted, and she didn’t enjoy it. With everything else it was the same. She couldn’t accustom herself to seeing the women drink cocktails at a luncheon, and the first time they passed their cigarette cases she almost gasped. But the thing that disgusted her above all else was the deceit that she discovered all about her. Her eyes were opened to this. One afternoon she called on Mrs. James, society matron, and the wife of one of Hugh’s friends. When she entered the room, three women she had met previously were seated at the tea-table. Their conversation ceased as abruptly as if a curtain had been rung down in the middle of an act. She paid little attention to the matter at the time, as they were all so charming in their manner toward her, and greeted her so effusively. For a while they discussed inconsequential topics, and then their conversation drifted to another woman, a member of their own set. At first there wasn’t anything really offensive in their remarks. It merely brought to the surface a feline quality unsuspected. But the conversation changed suddenly. To Marjorie it seemed these women surely couldn’t realize what they were saying. Like a pack of hungry wolves, they tore the woman they discussed into shreds. Dumfounded, Marjorie sat and listened. She couldn’t believe it possible that four women could say such scandalous things of another they called friend. She was sure their assertions were untrue, as they insinuated things impossible for anyone to know. They surmised merely, and it was upon such scant evidence that they set about to wreck a woman’s reputation. She felt that she could tolerate it no longer, and was about to protest, when the woman who had been under the hammer entered the room.