"What becomes of modesty and pride when a girl marries for money?" he asked coolly.
"Some women can give and accept in cold blood what it would be impossible for them to accord to a more intimate and emotional demand."
"No doubt an ethical distinction," he said, "but not very clear to me."
"I did not argue that such women are admirable or excusable.... But how many modern marriages in our particular vicinity are marriages of inclination, Ricky?"
"You're a washed-out lot," he said—"you're satiated as schoolgirls. If you have any emotions left they're twisted ones by the time you are introduced. Most débutantes of your sort make their bow equipped for business, and with the experience of what, practically, has amounted to several seasons.
"If any old-fashioned young girls remain in your orbit I don't know where to find them. Why, do you suppose any young girl, not yet out, would bother to go to a party of any sort where there was not champagne and a theatre-box and a supper in prospect? That's a fine comment on your children, Molly, but you know it's true and so does everybody who pretends to know anything about it."
"You talk like Karl Westguard," she said, laughing. "Anyway, what has all this to do with you and Strelsa Leeds?"
"Nothing." He shrugged. "She is part of your last word in social civilisation——"
"She is a very normal, sensitive, proud girl, who has known little except unhappiness all her life, Rix—including two years of marital misery—two years of horror.—And you forget that those two years were the result of a demand purely and brutally emotional—to which, a novice, utterly ignorant, she yielded—pushed on by her mother.... Please be fair to her; remember that her childhood was pinched with poverty, that her girlhood in school was a lonely one, embarrassed by lack of everything which her fashionable schoolmates had as matters of course.
"She could not go to the homes of her schoolmates in vacation times, because she could not ask them, in turn, to her own. She was still in school when Reggie Leeds saw her—and misbehaved—and the poor little thing was sent home, guiltless but already half-damned. No wonder her mother chased Reggie Leeds half around the world dragging her daughter by the wrist!"