The whole connection seethed! The notoriety of Flora's death was nothing compared with this notoriety. The police court! The newspapers! The gossip of Mrs. Childs's Bridge Club! And, on top of everything else, the shock to Laura.

"You see," Mrs. Payton explained to her daughter, "she's going to have a baby, and—"

"I know," Fred said, soberly; "she told me. Of course I wouldn't have let her go, if I'd known there was going to be rough-house."

"It's absurd to blame you," her mother said. "As I told your Aunt Bessie, 'It's absurd to blame Freddy!'"

"I don't mind being blamed. I oughtn't to have taken her, anyhow. She doesn't really care for the things I care for. She's entirely under Howard's thumb, poor dear!"

Mr. William Childs was almost sick with anger, and Mrs. Childs, with her calm interest in other people's troubles, agreed with Miss Mary Graham, who said that, of course, Miss Freddy meant well; but sometimes the brain defect didn't show at once, as it did in her brother. "It comes on when they are about twenty-five," said Miss Mary.

Mrs. Childs said that was the most charitable way to[Pg 273] look at it, and—amiably ready to tell anything to anybody—repeated the charitable opinion to Mrs. Payton.

"What did the older one say?" Fred's mother asked, distractedly.

Mrs. Childs hesitated: "Nothing very sensible; indeed, I don't know just what she meant. Something out of the Bible—that they said Christ had a devil, too. Quite profane, I thought."

"Fred isn't a devil!" Mrs. Payton said, angrily, her maternal claws ready to scratch the "older one," whose protection of Frederica was understood only by Arthur Weston, who loved her for it, but warned her that unless Bacon was the author of the phrase she had quoted it would not soothe the Childs family.

Certainly it did not soothe Bobby and Payton, who told their respective wives that Freddy ought to be shut up! "Allendale is the place for her," Bob said, mentioning a well-known insane-asylum. They told their brother-in-law that Laura ought to be ashamed of herself—which led to an in-law coolness that never quite thawed out.

"Of course I don't approve of it any more than you do," Howard said. "If I'd been at home, Laura wouldn't have gone with Fred. Trouble is, she's so sweet-tempered she does whatever anybody wants—and Fred insisted, you know. And when Laura was there she felt she had to stand by Fred—"

"Stand by your grandmother!" Payton Childs retorted. "If Fred was my sister, I'd stand by her—with a whip!"

"Well, there'll be no more speechifying in ours," Howard said, grimly. "But I won't have Laura blamed. What[Pg 274] she did, she did out of loyalty to Fred. When it comes to standing by, Laura is as decent as a man!"

Miss Spencer was of the opinion that Mrs. Payton had better take the girl to Europe—"under another name, perhaps; then she can't disgrace you. After all, Ellen, I believe she's just like Mortimore—only she doesn't jibber!"

"Miss Spencer!"

"I mean that though she has intellect, she—"

"Morty has intellect! Doctor Davis always said the intellect was there, but it was veiled!"

"Fred had better veil something," Miss Spencer said, dryly. "Her face, for instance, when she goes to jail."

"It wasn't a jail," Mrs. Payton protested, whimperingly.

Mrs. Holmes had her opinion, too; all Fred's didos, she said, were due to the fact that Mrs. Payton had not brought her up properly. She said this just as she was leaving the parlor, teetering along on her high-heeled shoes; then her voice suddenly roughened; she turned and glared at her daughter through her white veil.

"The amount of it is," she said, "Fred is worth all the rest of us put together! That's why we are so provoked at her. We know we're on the shelf, and useless old fools, every one of us! Especially William Childs."

Mrs. Payton was so astounded that she let her mother go out to her carriage unattended. But the words were a comfort to her, for, poor woman, she was struck from every side.

As for Fred, she listened listlessly to the jangle of [Pg 275]criticism, looking at her critics with curious eyes. How silly they all were! So long as the experience of being arrested had not injured Laura, what difference did it make? With her conception of the values of life, the momentary unpleasantness of newspaper notoriety was not worth thinking of. Fred was very listless now. Something had touched the garment of life, and energy and hope had gone out of it.

She ceased to be young.

The rebuff of unaccepted love she had faced gallantly; its accompanying knowledge of shame and pity and sympathy, had only steadied her; even her own irrationality in disliking Laura (she had recognized with chagrin that dislike was irrational, and she hated, she told herself, to be an idiot!)—all these emotional experiences had merely deepened and humanized her. But the discovery that the Howard Maitland she thought she knew, had never lived, was a staggering blow. The other Howard—the real Howard—honest, sweet-hearted, simple, who had found her conversation no end amusing and interesting, who had been a patient receptacle for her opinions and an amiable echo of her volubility, who had swallowed many yawns out of kindness as well as courtesy—the Howard beneath whose charm of good manners lurked the primitive fierceness of the male who protects his woman at any cost, that Howard had never made the slightest appeal to her. The jar of stepping down from the ideal man to the real man racked her, body and sou............