'Oh, those!' contemptuously. 'One doesn't open one's heart quite wide to such friends as those.'
'Then if you care about them so little, why not give them up and please your husband?'
'One must be intimate with somebody,' she said entreatingly, 'even if it's only a tea-drinking and scandal-talking intimacy.'
'But why with these particular people?'
'Because we all have a particular grievance: we all have bad husbands. At least—no, Fabian's not a bad husband,' she corrected hastily; 'but we are all dissatisfied with our husbands.'
'Perhaps the husbands of those ladies I saw with you at the theatre—forgive me if I am making a rude and ridiculous mistake—are dissatisfied with them?' I suggested, very meekly and mildly.
'I daresay they are,' she answered, flushing. 'The less a man has of domestic virtues, the more he invariably expects from his wife.'
'I am not surprised that Fabian shrinks from the thought of your looking as they do.'
'You mean that they make up their faces? Mr. Maude, Mr. Maude, listen. A woman must have something to live upon, to live for. If through her fault or her misfortune, there is not love enough at home to keep her heart warm, she will—I don't say she ought, but she does—look about for a make-shift, and finds it in the admiration of some lad younger than herself, who is ready to give more than he ever hopes to receive. The boys like dyed hair and powdered faces, they think it "chic." But my friends are not the depraved creatures Fabian would like to make out.'
I was horribly shocked at her defence of these ladies, for it showed a bitter knowledge of some of the world's ways that jarred on the lips of a woman of twenty.