“Oh, no! Her home’s in Jeffersonville or New Albany, I forget which. It’s one of those Ohio river towns.”
“It was certainly kind of her to have Mr. Trenton look you up,” said Mrs. Durland. “But I wish you’d asked him to the house. It doesn’t seem just right for you to be going out with a man your family doesn’t know. I’m not saying, dear, that there’s any impropriety; only I think it would give him a better impression of all of us if we met him.”
“Oh, I meant to bring him up but he’s so terribly busy. He works everywhere he goes right up to the last minute. And it was much simpler to meet him at the Sycamore.”
“He’s married, is he not?” asked Ethel.
“Oh, yes!” said Grace, heartily regretting now that she had opened the way for this question. “His wife is Mary Graham Trenton who write and lectures.”
“That woman,” exclaimed Mrs. Durland, plainly horrified. “She is one of the most dangerous of all the foes of decency in this country! Last spring we had a discussion of her ideas in the West End Club. I hadn’t known how utterly without shame a woman could be till one of our members wrote a paper about her.”
“I’ve heard that she’s very wealthy,” interposed Ethel in a tone which suggested that, no matter how utterly destructive of public morals Mrs. Trenton’s ideas might be, as a rich woman she was not wholly beyond the pale. “It’s all the more remarkable that she’s opposed to marriage and nearly everything else, or pretends to be, when she belongs to one of the oldest American families and inherited her wealth.”
“I don’t know that Mr. Trenton accepts her ideas,” said Grace. “He hasn’t discussed them with me. He seemed rather amused when I told him I’d read her ‘Clues to a New Social Order’.”
“You haven’t read that awful thing?” cried Mrs. Durland.
“Why, certainly, mother; I read it last winter. It’s not so awfully shocking; I suppose there are a good many people who believe as Mrs. Trenton does.”