"As thrilling a drama can be unrolled in a twenty-five dollar flat as in a palace."
"Stuff! There isn't one of those women who wouldn't be keen to try the palace!"
"As you ought to be to try the flat, in a normally constituted society."
"What do you mean by a normally constituted society?"
"One where the goal of ease is not merely entertainment."
"You are preaching now, aren't you?" demanded Isabelle. "Society has always been pretty much the same, hasn't it? First necessities, then comforts, then luxuries, and then—"
"Well, what?"
"Oh, experience, art, culture, I suppose."
"Isabelle," the big man smilingly commented, "you are the same woman you were six years ago."
"I am not!" she protested, really irritated. "I have done a lot of thinking, and I have seen a good deal of life. Besides I am a good wife, and a mother, which I wasn't six years ago, and a member of the Country Homes Society and the Orphanage, and a lot more." They laughed at her defence, and Isabelle added as a concession: "I know that there are plenty of women not in society who lead interesting lives, are intelligent and all that. But I am a good wife, and a good mother, and I am intelligent, and what is more, I see amusing people and more of them than the others,—the just plain women. What would you have me do?"