Eugene Vickery’s sister Dorothy lived in Blithevale. Having lost her first choice, Bret Winfield, to the scintillating Sheila, she had sensibly accepted the devotion   
of his rival, Jim Greeley, who was now a junior partner in the big chemical works where his father manufactured drug staples.
 
Dorothy had never forgotten the child Sheila, and the two women resumed their acquaintance, their souls little changed, for all their bodily evolution. They were still 
 
two little girls playing with dolls. They were still utterly incomprehensible to each other, and the friendlier for that fact. Dorothy found Sheila a trifle insane, 
 
but immensely interesting, and Sheila found Dorothy stodgily Philistine, but thoroughly reliable, as normal as a yardstick.
 
Sheila gave to her two children all the adoration of a Madonna. They were fascinating toys to her; though at times she tired of them. She entertained them with all her 
 
talents, wasting on the infantile private audience graces and gifts that the public would have paid thousands of dollars to see.
 
But the children tired of their expensive toy, too, and preferred a rag doll or a little tin automobile that banged into chair legs and turned over at the edge of a 
 
rug.
 
Sheila had nursed her babies with an ecstatic pride. That was more than many of the village women did. She had been amazed to learn how many bottle-fed infants there 
 
were in town. Dorothy herself strongly recommended one or two foods prepared in other factories than the mother’s veins.
 
Dorothy was not the mother one meets in romance, but very much like the mothers next door and across the street—the ones the doctors know. Her children drove her into 
 
storms of impatience and outbursts of temper. Now and then she had to get away from them for half a day or for many days. If she could not escape on a shopping prowl 
 
to some other city she would send them off with the nurse under instructions to stay as long as the light held out. She welcomed their visits to relatives, she 
 
encouraged them to play in other people’s yards. Other mothers with headaches urged their children to play in one another’s yards. Nobody knew very well where they 
 
played or at what.
 
Dorothy was a violent anti-suffragist and the head of the local league, whose motto was that woman’s place is in the home. She was kept away from home a good deal in 
 
the furtherance of this creed.
 
Jim Greeley, the normal business man, spent his days at his desk, his evenings at his club, and his free afternoons at baseball games. Sometimes he added a little 
 
variety to the peace of his household by rolling in late, lyrical and incoherent.
 
There was a general impression about town that he found his home so well ordered that he sought a recreative disorder elsewhere. From the first meeting with him Sheila 
 
disliked the way he looked at her. His eyes, as it were, crossed swords with hers playfully and said, “Do you fence?” She found the compliments he murmured to her 
 
whenever opportunities arrived uncomfortably unctuous. But there was nothing that she could openly resent.
 
In the summer all the wives of Blithevale whose husbands had the money or could borrow it followed the national custom and went to the seashore, the mountains, 
 
anywhere to get away from home and husband; they took the children with them. The husbands stuck to their jobs and made occasional dashes to their families. All signs 
 
fail in hot weather. Even the churches close up. It is curious. It is even agreed that the rule about woman’s place being the home does not hold in hot weather.
 
Dorothy and Sheila and their youngsters went together one summer to a beach with nearly as much boardwalk as sand.
 
Sheila fretted about leaving Bret at his lonely grindstone. Dorothy ridiculed her and told her she must get over her honeymoon. Dorothy emphasized the importance of 
 
the sea air “for the children.” She insisted that a mother’s first duty was to them. Dorothy paid little enough heed to her own. She slept late, played cards, 
 
watched the dancing, and changed her clothes with a chameleonic frequence.
 
Sheila found that her children, like the rest, preferred the company of fellow-children and the sea to any other attractions. Their mothers bored them, hampered them, 
 
disgraced them. The children were self-sufficient, and better so. By the early evening they had played themselves into a comatose condition and never knew who took off 
 
their shoes or put them to bed. The long evenings remained to the mothers and they formed porch-colonies, and rocked and gabbled and stared through the windows at the 
 
dancers.
 
All over the country wives were enjoying their summer divorce. Thousands, millions of wives deserted their husbands and loafed at great cost, and it was all right. But 
 
for an actress to desert her husband and work—that was all wrong!
 
Sheila felt that her husband needed her more than her children did. She pictured him distraught with longing for her. And he was—so far as his business worries gave 
 
him time for sentimental worries. Sheila left the children in charge of the governess and fled back to Bret, who was enraptured at the sight of her and had an enormous 
 
amount of factory news to tell her.
 
The men-folk were working in spite of the summer, and glad to be working. Bret was absorbed in his business and left Sheila all day to sit in the darkened oven of the 
 
closed-up house, alone.
 
She contrasted her life this summer with the summer she had played in the stock company and toiled so hard to furnish amusement to the people who could not get away to 
 
seashores or mountains. She wondered wherein her present indolence was an improvement over her period of toil.
 
Still she was glad to be where her husband could find her in the brief entr’actes of his commercial drama. She had............