"It isn't so!" her sister assured her.

"Well, then, three times a week."

"That's a very different matter." Suddenly she thought of Richard, and the fecund diligence, on her side at least, of their correspondence. She scowled. And then she went and bent over the girl in bed. "Can you see any powder on my face?"

Hilda said she thought she could see just a tiny little bit of rouge. So Louise rubbed her face vigorously with a towel, by way of destroying any possible trace of artificiality, and bringing thus a heightened natural bloom.

There really was very little artificiality about the Needham girls. The Rev. Needham was always nervously on the lookout for that. His great horror was such episodes as are dear to the hearts of novelists: episodes in which soul-rending moral issues appear. And he believed, and often quite eloquently gave expression to the belief, that a subtle germ of artificiality lay at the root of all emotional excesses. Louise's unhappy affair with Richard, the Rev. Needham was pleased to lay almost squarely at the door of Eastern Culture. To be perfectly candid, the Rev.[Pg 21] Needham did not know a great deal about this so-called Eastern Culture. But he was persuaded—as are perhaps many more good souls in the Middle West—that it was something covertly if not patently inimical to those standards of sane, quiet living to which he almost passionately subscribed. Why had they ever sent her East at all? "It was that fashionable school that did all the harm," he would say, with a sigh in which there was more than a hint of indignation. Louise herself, whatever she might think of the Culture, admitted that half the girls in the school were deep in love affairs, most of which bore every promise of turning out badly. The school was in that paradise of schools, the nation's capital. It was a finishing school, and a judicious indulgence in social activities was admittedly—even a bit arrogantly—one of the features of the curriculum.

[Pg 21]

Ah, yes. That was just where all the mischief began. If she had stayed home instead and received young men in her mother's own Middle Western parlour, she might have been spared—they might all have been spared—that terrible ordeal of the heart, with its gloomy envelope of humiliation. In plain terms, Richard had simply turned her down. One might argue about it, but one could not, in the end, really deceive oneself. He had turned her down, thrown her over, jilted her, after flirting desperately and wickedly—though in a manner which the Rev. 

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