“I’m not ashamed to tell who brings me home anyhow,” Ethel flung at her.
“Neither, for that matter, am I! It was Mr. Thomas Ripley Kemp who brought me home last night. He’d taken Irene and me for a drive.”
“So that was it! I thought I recognized the car. That Kemp! I suppose he’s getting tired of Irene and is looking for another girl!”
“Well, dearie, he hasn’t said anything about it,” Grace replied. “But you never can tell.”
“Girls! This must stop right here! We can’t have the day beginning with a wrangle. You both ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
“I’m through, mother,” said Grace. “I didn’t start the row. I’ve reached a place where Ethel doesn’t really worry me any more.”
“Well, you were always a tease and Ethel is sensitive. I do wish you’d both exercise a little restraint.”
Grace found a brief note in the society column of the morning paper recording Mrs. Trenton’s departure, and an editorial ridiculing her opinions. Elsewhere there were interviews with a dozen prominent men and women on Mrs. Trenton’s lecture, all expressing disapproval of her ideas. A leading Socialist disavowed any sympathy with Mrs. Trenton’s programme and denounced her “Clues to a New Social Order” as a mere rehash of other books. He characterized her as a woman of wealth who was merely seeking notoriety by parading herself as a revolutionist and who would be sure to resist, with the innate selfishness and greed of her class, any interference with her personal comfort and ease.
Grace carried the newspaper with her to the trolley and on the way down town reread these criticisms of Mrs. Trenton with keenest satisfaction. Mrs. Trenton was not a great woman animated by a passion of humanity but narrow, selfish and cruel. She thought again of the encounter at Miss Reynolds’s with renewed sympathy for Trenton. After all he had met the difficult situation in the only way possible. He had said once that he didn’t understand his wife and Grace consoled herself with the reflection that probably no one could understand her, least of all, her husband.
In the course of the day Grace learned from Irene that Kemp, who was on the entertainment committee for a large national convention, had decided to ask several friends among the delegates to The Shack.