To really know the state of the feminine mind at this time, one
would have to go back to that period in the Middle Ages when the
Church flourished and the industrious poet, half schooled in the
facts of life, surrounded women with a mystical halo. Since that
day the maiden and the matron as well has been schooled to believe
that she is of a finer clay than man, that she was born to uplift
him, and that her favors are priceless. This rose-tinted mist of
romance, having nothing to do with personal morality, has brought
about, nevertheless, a holier-than-thou attitude of women toward
men, and even of women toward women. Now the Chicago atmosphere
in which Aileen found herself was composed in part of this very
illusion. The ladies to whom she had been introduced were of this
high world of fancy. They conceived themselves to be perfect,
even as they were represented in religious art and in fiction.
Their husbands must be models, worthy of their high ideals, and
other women must have no blemish of any kind. Aileen, urgent,
elemental, would have laughed at all this if she could have
understood. Not understanding, she felt diffident and uncertain
of herself in certain presences.

Instance in this connection Mrs. Norrie Simms, who was a satellite
of Mrs. Anson Merrill. To be invited to the Anson Merrills' for
tea, dinner, luncheon, or to be driven down-town by Mrs. Merrill,
was paradise to Mrs. Simms. She loved to recite the bon mots of
her idol, to discourse upon her astonishing degree of culture, to
narrate how people refused on occasion to believe that she was the
wife of Anson Merrill, even though she herself declared it--those
old chestnuts of the social world which must have had their origin
in Egypt and Chaldea. Mrs. Simms herself was of a nondescript
type, not a real personage, clever, good-looking, tasteful, a