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 toward what we may term, for convenience, other women. For you are a good girl; all your friends are good girls, living in prosperous, honorable, protected homes. A man of the sort you meet would consider himself lower than a dog—and his friends would put him down below the lowest cur if they let him live at all—if ever once he adopted within himself an attitude toward you which he may, without loss of a single friend, persistently hold toward other women. When such a man marries a girl like you, one of three things is bound to happen; either he has fallen into the passion which we may call pure love and at least temporarily—and perhaps permanently—he abandons all other attitudes except the one he maintains toward you; or, in another case, he maintains both his former attitude toward you and his other former attitude toward other women, or, in the third, he shows his wife both. In either of the latter instances, I am very likely to hear from some one soon."

He had not avoided her while speaking; but now his glance shifted from her to the dictation machine on his desk. It was plain he considered he had said all he wished and he desired her to go. "Thank you," she said, subdued. "Thank you very much. I am what I am—so ignorant that I can not even understand an answer as to why my father has done what he has—because I live in a prosperous, honorable, protected home, you said. Then, if I did not, I would soon become able to understand?"

Rinderfeld looked up so quickly that he almost jerked. "Too soon," he said sharply. "The women like you who never understand make the world worth living in, I think; I'm not sure," he qualified honestly. "It is one of the anomalies of life I'm trying to make