The telephone rang. A maid answered it. "It is for you, Miss Evelyn."
"It is Pip," Eve said, as she turned from the telephone; "he's coming up."
Aunt Maude surveyed her. "You're not going to receive him as you are?"
"As I am? Why not?"
"Eve, go to your room and put something on," Aunt Maude agonized; "when I was a girl——"
Evelyn dropped a kiss on her cheek. "When you were a girl, Aunt Maude, you were very pretty, and you wore very low necks and short sleeves on the street, and short dresses—and—and——"
Remembering the family album, Aunt Maude stopped her hastily. "It doesn't make any difference what I wore. You are not going to receive any gentleman in that ridiculous jacket."
Eve surveyed herself in an oval mirror set above a console-table. "I think I look rather nice. And Pip would like me in anything. Aunt Maude, it's a queer world for us women. The men that we want don't want us, and the men that we don't want adore us. The emancipation of women will come when they can ask men to marry them."
She was ruffling the feathers on the green parrot's head. He caught her finger carefully in his claw and crooned.
Aunt Maude rose. "I had twenty proposals—your uncle's was the twentieth. I loved him at first sight, and I loved him until he left me."