"Nonsense!" she rejoined; "but Gerty is so faithful to her young fellow down South that it has gone to her brain."
"I am faithful because I have no opportunity for faithlessness," sang Gerty to an accompaniment she was picking upon the guitar. "I have been in love one—two—six times since I came to New York. Once it was with an editor, who accepted my first story. He was short and thick and gray-haired, but I loved him. Once it was with that dark, ill-fed man who rooms next to Mariana. He almost knocked me down upon the stairway and forgot to apologize. I have forgotten the honorable others, as the Japanese say, but I know it is six times, because whenever it happened I made a little cross-mark on my desk, and there are six of them."
"It must have been Mr. Ardly," said Mariana. "I never look at him without thinking what an adorable lover he would make."
"He has such nice hands," said Miss Oliver. "I do like a man with nice hands."
"And he is clean-shaven," added Miss Freighley. "I detest a man with a beard."
Miss Hill crossed her thin ankles upon the hearth.
"Love should be taken seriously," she said, with a wistful look in her dark eyes.
Miss Freighley's pretty, inconsequent laugh broke in.
"That is one of Juliet's platitudes," she said. "But, my dear, it shouldn't be taken seriously. Indeed, it shouldn't be taken at all—except in cases of extreme ennui, and then in broken doses. The women who take men seriously—and taking love means taking men, of course—sit down at home and grow shapeless and have babies galore. To grow shapeless is the fate of the woman who takes sentiment seriously. It is a more convincing argument against it than all the statistics of the divorce court—"
"For the Lord's sake, Carrie, beware of woman's rights," protested Miss Oliver. "That is exactly what Mrs. Simpson said in her lecture on 'Our Tyrant, Man.' Why, those dear old aunts of yours in Alabama have inserted an additional clause in their Litany: 'From intemperance, evil desires, and woman's suffrage, good Lord deliver us!' They are grounded in the belief that the new woman is an édition de luxe of the devil."