she had been assured, was veritable love since early childhood. Her
mother's dressing, the irritable hours of fittings and at her
mirror, the paint she put on her cheeks, the crimping of her hair
were for the favor of men. These struggles had absorbed the elder,
all the women Linda had encountered, to the exclusion of everything
else. This, it seemed, must, from its overwhelming predominance, be
the greatest thing in life.

There was nothing mysterious about it. You did certain things
intelligently, if you had the figure to do them with, for a
practical end. The latter, carefully controlled, like an essence of
which a drop was delightful and more positively stifling, was as
real as the methods of approach. Oatmeal or scented soap! The force of
example and association combined to bathe such developments in the
sanest light possible, and Linda had every intention of the successful
grasping of an easy and necessary luxury. She had, until--vaguely--now,
been entirely willing to accept the unescapable conditions of love
used as a means or the element of pleasure at parties. Now, however,
the unexpected element of Dodge Pleydon disturbed her philosophy.

Suddenly all the lacing and painting and crimping, the pretense and
lies and carefully planned accidental effects, filled her with
revolt. The insinuations of women, the bareness of their
revelations, her mother returning unsteady and mussed from a dinner,
were unutterably disgusting. Even to think of them hurt her
fundamentally: so much of what she was, of what she had determined,
had been destroyed by an emotion apparently as slight as echoed
music.

Here was the real mystery and for which nothing in her experience