to tell you that. What chance has she in this house? The doors that are worth while are closed to you, my dear. You know I say that with no unkind intent. It is something you yourself acknowledge. The same doors would be closed to your daughter if she came here. She could and would do so much better with me. Neither you nor she would be dependent. We are too old friends for that. And I know George Treharne. He would renew the allowance that you permitted Judd to thrust back at him through yourself and his lawyer. Leave this place, this sort of thing, once and forever. I want you to—for your own sake and your daughter's."

Mrs. Treharne wept dismally, to the sad derangement of her elaborately-applied make-up. But she wept the tears of self-pity, than which there are none more pitiful. The reins of a great chance, for herself and her daughter, were in her hands. Perhaps it was the intensity of her perturbation that did not permit her to hold them. Very likely it was something else. But, at any rate, hold them she did not.

"You are a dear, Laura," she said, fighting back her tears for the sake of her make-up. "It was what I might have expected of you. Of all the friends I used to have, you are the only one who never has gone back on me. But you must see how impossible it all is. I am in over my head. So what would be the use?"

"You speak for yourself only, Antoinette," said Laura, a little coldly. "What of your daughter?"

"Oh, if only she were a boy!" the wretched woman harped again.

Laura Stedham removed her arm from her friend's shoulder and shrugged a bit impatiently.

"That refrain again?" she said, the warmth departing from her tone. "I must be going before I become vexed with you, Tony. Your own position would be quite the same in any case—if you had a son instead of a daughter, I mean. For my part, I fail to perceive any choice between being shamed in the eyes of a son of in the eyes of a daughter. True, a son would not have to tolerate so humiliating a situation. A son could, and unquestionably would, clap on his hat the moment he became aware of the state of things here, and stamp out, leaving it all behind him. A son could and would shift for himself. But a girl—a girl just out of school—can't do that. She is helpless. She is at the mercy of the situation you have made for her. I fear you are completely losing your moorings, Tony. When is Louise arriving?"

"Tonight," replied Mrs. Treharne, who had subsided into a 

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