“Ah!” he interrupted her.
Her usually orderly mind grew confused; it eddied as though with the sound of the piano. “It is not marriage,” she vaguely repeated her mother's instruction. Reynold Chase supported her.
“That destroys it,” he asserted. “This love is as different as possible from the ignominious impulse eternally tying the young into knots. It's anti-social.”
“How stupid you are, Reynold,” Pansy protested. “If you want to use those complicated words take Judith into the drawing-room. I'm sure Linda is dizzy, too.”
The latter's mental confusion lingered; she had a strong sense of having heard Reynold Chase say these strange things long before. Judith left the piano, sat beside him, and he lightly kissed her. A new dislike of Judith Feldt deepened in Linda's being. She had no reason for it, but suddenly she felt absolutely opposed to her. The manner in which Judith rested against the man by her was very distasteful. It offended Linda inexplicably; she wanted to draw into an infinity of distance from all contact with men and life.
She didn't even want to make one of those marriages that had nothing to do with love, but was only a sensible arrangement for the securing of gowns and velvet hangings and the luxury of enclosed automobiles. Suddenly she felt lonely, and hoped that her mother would come back soon.
XII
But when her mother, now Mrs. Moses Feldt, did return, Linda was conscious of a keen disappointment. Somehow she never actually came back. It wasn't only that, after so many years together, she occupied a room with another than Linda, but her manner was changed; it had lost all freedom of heart and speech. The new Mrs. Feldt was heavily polite to her husband's daughters; Linda saw that she liked Pansy, but Judith made her uncomfortable. She expressed this in an isolated return of the old confidences: