Anne shrugged. "If Moms had never fallen for that first pot-roast——"
"If Eve had never picked the apple."
"Well? You don't know what the world might have been like if she hadn't, do you?"
"I can make a guess. It would have been just about as it is—if not a little worse. She would have found a pear or a cranberry or a walnut, any old thing." Belle leaned slightly forward and peered with genuine concern through the thickening film of tobacco smoke at the small blonde figure, sitting stiffly now on the bed-edge. "Anne, do you know that I worry a lot about you sometimes? I know you're a good stenographer and as economically independent as any woman, but it always seems to me as if you were out of step with the world in some way. You don't plunk, plunk along with the rest of us. You—you——"
"Sit down on the curb-stone."
"No. You mince along reluctantly. I wish to Heaven you'd get married."
Anne flushed, but Belle was grinding her cigarette stub into Anne's lacquered pin tray and did not notice. She ground it into the polished surface as if the tray were the problem of Anne's future and the stub her own power of settling the difficulty. When she had burned the delicate surface to a black spot, she went on. "But I can't for the life of me picture the kind of man you would marry, not with your opportunities for meeting them. An ordinary business man would drive you as crazy as you would drive him. A professional man—well, there's not much difference. An up-to-date doctor, even an up-to-date minister, has just as keen an eye for the main chance as John Lowell—and that's what seems to upset you. And even if you found one straight in business—men are rotten morally, most of them, and you're so—I don't know just what it is, Anne, but you're like a cool drink in a very clean glass, and men want beer in an earthen mug when it comes right down to everyday diet. They want it in women just as much as they do in business."
"I don't believe it." Anne spoke with such vehement assurance that Belle looked at her sharply.
"You don't? Why not?"
Anne wished now that she had not spoken, but the quickest way to escape from that gimlet-like boring of Belle's eyes was to go on. "It isn't true of all men in business and I don't see why it should be true of all men morally."