"It can never be made clean, the world we women live in. But there should never be such worlds. Good women pretend they do not know. They do not want to know!"
"But, Lillie"—I tried to hold her twisting, writhing hands. "There is much that has been done. Some women do know, and homes and institutions and societies—"
"Homes and institutions and societies!" She drew her hands away in scornful gesture. "They are poultice and plaster things. They are for surface sores, and the trouble is in the blood. To cure, to cleanse, undo the evil of our world is not in human power. It's the root of the tree that must be killed. You can cut off its top for a thousand years and it will come back again. Women have got to go deeper than that and make men know that they'll be damned the same as we if they sin the same as we do."
She was slipping from me and I tried to hold her back. "Tell me what women must do! Tell me where they fail!" In terror I caught her hands. "Do not go until you tell me—"
In misty grayness she was vanishing. "When women make their sons know there is no less of sin and shame in sinful, shameful lives for them than for their sisters our worlds will pass away. You've got to stop the evil at the source. Men don't do what women won't stand for. Tell women that—"
She was gone and, waking, I found I was sitting up in bed, my hands outstretched.
I had a note from Selwyn to-day telling me the Swinks had come and are at the Melbourne. Harrie is not well.
Kitty telephoned me late yesterday afternoon that Billie had an engagement for a club dinner of some sort, and she had appendicitis, or something that felt like it, and wouldn't I please come up and have supper with her in her sitting-room. There was something she wanted to talk to me about.
Kitty has a remarkable voice. It is capable of every variation of appeal. I went. Mrs. Crimm came in to stay with Mrs. Mundy.
The appendicitis possibility was not disturbing, and in a very lovely pink velvet negligee, with cap and slippers and stockings to match, Kitty was waiting for me. She is peculiarly skilful in the settings she arranges for her pretty self, and as I looked at her they seemed far-away things, the world of Scarborough Square, with its daily struggle for daily bread, and the world of Lillie Pierce, with its evil and polluting life, and the world of the little cashier-girl with its temptations and denials. I tried to put them from me. The evening was to be Kitty's. She took her luxuries as the birds of the air take light and sunshine. Unearned, they seemed a right.