“Yes ... because it smacks of the small town. She hasn’t any better taste than mamma has. It wouldn’t jolt her the way it would Lary or papa. Lady Judith, I used to cringe and sweat blood when Hal said crass things before Lary. Now it doesn’t matter what my brother thinks. I want to shout Hal from the house-tops. I don’t care who knows that we love each other, and that we have broken all the silly shackles that our stodgy civilization thinks are so important. Papa dislikes him because he isn’t the Sunday school kind, and Lary says he’s crude and common. Well, just the way he is ... is exactly right for me. I’m no Dresden china shepherdess, myself. How would I feel, marrying a man who couldn’t stand for a little slang—or expressing your real feelings, now and then? With such a man as Lary or Syd Schubert, I’d be a fish out of water.”
“Are you quite sure you are a fish?” Judith asked searchingly. “Did it ever occur to you, my dear, that you have been in the water with Hal until you fancy yourself a fish of his kind? Aren’t you afraid that you’ll be tossed up on the bank some day, a little drowned bird?”
“No! No!” Eileen screamed, her cheeks blanching. “Don’t take all the glory, all the wonder out of it. Don’t you understand that I am free? You talk about slave-women. Men don’t make slaves of them. It is their own selfishness that chains them. I wish I could pour out my heart to you ... make you see it as I do. Not the sordid thing that love usually is—Sylvia’s love for Oliver, that pays for a swell apartment and a bundle of gaudy rags. I want to be free, and I want to show other women the light.”
“My dear, dear girl,” Mrs. Ascott cried in alarm, “you are only sixteen. You haven’t even the rudiments of the system you are trying to teach. Can’t you get your feet on solid ground and stay there until you are a few years older? I was wrong when I suggested water. You are up in the clouds. If I thought it would serve to deter you from this madness, Eileen, I would open for you the darkest chapter of my life.”
“I know ... already. I heard mamma telling papa that you were divorced—that you tried to get even with your husband by running away with another man. It was contemptible of me to listen; but I did it because I wanted to see how bad she would make it out.”
Judith Ascott’s face flamed.
“And papa was quiet a long time—and then he said that there were some people who could touch pitch and not be defiled. When he said that—it got me by the heart, and I made a little gurgling noise in my throat. I was sure they heard me. But mamma flared back at him so furiously that I was half way down the stairs before they came out of their room. That was several weeks ago—a few days after you told her. And I wondered how it would affect him—towards you.”
“And—”
“The next morning at breakfast, he said you were the purest, noblest woman he had met in years. And Theo and Lary and I all raised such a chorus of approval that mamma ran out to the kitchen to tell Drusilla that the waffles were tough.”
An arm stole around the girl’s waist. What had come over Judith Ascott, that she should care ... that David Trench’s approval should mean so much? But Eileen misunderstood. In a sudden burst of confidence, she whispered: