"No, and I'll see to it that she never does. She's my sort of
woman, and the children are absolute loves! I like that sort of
old-fashioned prejudice--honestly I do--that honor-thy-father-and-
thy-mother-and-keep holy-the-sabbath-day sort of person. Don't
you, Greg?"

"We--ll, I don't like narrowness, sweet."

"No." Rachael pondered in the dark. "Yet if you're not narrow you
seem to be--really the only word for it is--loose," she submitted.
"Somehow lately, a great many persons--the girls I know--do seem
to be a little bit that way."

"You don't find THEM judging you!" her husband said. Rachael
answered only by a rather faint negative; she would not elucidate
further. This was one of the things she could never tell Warren, a
thing indeed that she would hardly admit to her own soul.

But she said to herself that she knew now the worst evil of
divorce. She knew that it coarsened whomever it touched, that it
irresistibly degraded, that it lowered all the human standard of
goodness and endurance, and self-sacrifice. However justified, it
was an evil; however properly consummated, it soiled the little
group it affected. The disinclination of a good woman like Alice
Valentine to enter into a close friendship with a younger and
richer and more beautiful woman whose history was the history of
Rachael Gregory was no mere prejudice. It was the feeling of a
restrained and disciplined nature for an unchecked and ill-
regulated one; it was the feeling of a woman who, at any cost, had
kept her solemn marriage vow toward a woman who had broken her