about him."

"Then, my dear," replied Joan, making a very special ring of smoke,
"you know more about him than I do."

Alice began to walk about. A form of marriage--that was the phrase
that stuck in her mind. And here was a girl who was without a
genuine friend in all that heartless town except herself, and a fine
boy who needed one, she began to see, very badly. She, at any rate,
and she thanked God for it, was properly married, and she owed it to
friendship to make a try to put things right with these two.

"Joan, I believe I do," she said. "I really believe I do, although
I've only had one real talk with him. You're terribly and awfully
young, I know. You had a bad year with your grandfather and
grandmother, and the reaction has made you wild and careless. But
you're not a girl who has been brought up behind a screen in a room
lighted with one candle. You know what marriage means. There isn't a
book you haven't read or a thing you haven't talked over. And if you
imagine that Martin is content to play Paul to your imitation
Virginia, you're wrong. Oh, Joan, you're dangerously wrong."

Settling into her chair and working her shoulders more comfortably
into the cushion, Joan crossed one leg over the other and lighted
another cigarette. "Go on," she said with a tantalizing smile. "I
love to hear you talk. It's far more interesting than listening to
Howard Cannon's dark prophecies about the day after to-morrow and
his gloomy rumblings about the writing on the wall. You stand for
the unemancipated married woman. Don't you?"