"And here endeth the first lesson," she said quite calmly, then
laughed with a laughter that was tantalizing and tormenting.
"What is the matter? You are not shocked?"

"I am frightened," Saxon quavered huskily, with a half-sob of
nervousness. "You frighten me. I am very foolish, and I know so
little, that I had never dreamed . . . THAT."

Mercedes nodded her head comprehendingly.

"It is indeed to be frightened at," she said. "It is solemn; it
is terrible; it is magnificent!"



CHAPTER IV

Saxon had been clear-eyed all her days, though her field of
vision had been restricted. Clear-eyed, from her childhood days
with the saloonkeeper Cady and Cady's good-natured but unmoral
spouse, she had observed, and, later, generalized much upon sex.
She knew the post-nuptial problem of retaining a husband's love,
as few wives of any class knew it, just as she knew the
pre-nuptial problem of selecting a husband, as few girls of the
working class knew it.

She had of herself developed an eminently rational philosophy of
love. Instinctively, and consciously, too, she had made toward
delicacy, and shunned the perils of the habitual and commonplace.
Thoroughly aware she was that as she cheapened herself so did she