"Marry a rich man, Janet, and the memory of that Claude affair will die a natural death. Marry a poor one, and it will keep on bobbing up."
"I shouldn't care if it did."
"No, you wouldn't, but your husband would."
"So my friends are at some pains to remind me," said Janet, rather bitterly. "You and Cornelia keep on telling me so, and Robert once expressed the same opinion."
"Well, he was right. I don't say it from spite, like Cornelia does. I say it because I'm—because I'm damned fond of you—"
She repressed the tears in her eyes.
"You're the only one here," she went on, choking down a sob, "that doesn't treat me as though I was an escaped inmate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and ought to be sent back there."
Janet went to her side and comforted her. But Mazie would not be comforted. She burst out with:
"The trouble with us girls is that we're too soft about love, as soft as putty. What good does all this talk and fuss about the equality of women do us? Where does it get us? Just exactly nowhere. And women won't be worth as much as men, until they're as hard about love as men are; and that means as hard as nails."
Divining Janet's silent comment, Mazie added defiantly that it was because she herself hadn't been hard enough that she had come to grief at the hands of "that swine Hutchins."