"Yes, I know," said Jean Leslie bitterly. "You need not tell me. I should like to have just five minutes' talk, in here, with the man that invented the higher education of women! However, that is a digression. Your friend's case, as I have said, is different. Evidently she is not that sort of girl. I don't know what advice to give her, poor soul. She is in deep waters. But you can tell her from me—"
"Yes?" said Peggy eagerly.
"That she is doing the wrong thing"—Peggy caught her breath—"for the right reason. You can also tell her that she is a brave lass. Perhaps it may help her a little to be told that."
"I know it will," said Peggy getting up. "Goodbye, Jean, dearest! I think I will go and tell her now."
Jean Leslie sat long over the teacups, deep in thought. Mechanically, she found and lit a cigarette, and smoked it to the end. Then she lit another. Darkness had fallen by this time, but still she sat on, gazing into the glowing fire.
At last she rose, and turned up the electric lights. Having done this, she surveyed herself intently in the mirror over the mantelpiece. For all her forty-three years she was a youthful woman. She possessed the white teeth and fair complexion that Scandinavian ancestry has bequeathed to the northeastern Highlands of Scotland. Her hair was abundant, and with a little better dressing would have looked more abundant still.
She turned from the mirror with a quaint little moue, and her eyes fell upon a framed photograph which stood upon her writing-table. It was a portrait of Peggy's mother. She picked it up, and regarded it long and thoughtfully.
"Thank God, Death cannot always close the account," she said softly.
Then, with a resigned sigh and a downward glance at her comfortable but unfashionable attire, she seated herself abruptly at the bureau and wrote a letter to her dressmaker.