Now she began to speak.

She spoke more eagerly and more fluently than he, and it took him several minutes to see that quite unconsciously she was making him a strange, distorted complement to his speech, that in her mouth such words as "the leisure classes, your sheltered girls," were terms of the deepest reproach.

He must understand, she said, that as she did not know Miss Severance, there was nothing personal, nothing at all personal, in her feeling,--she was as careful not to hurt his feelings as he had tried to be not to hurt hers,--but she did own to a prejudice--at least Pete told her it was a prejudice-- Against what, in Heaven's name, Lanley at first wondered; and then it came to him.
"Oh, you have a prejudice against divorce ?" he said.
Mrs.Wayne looked at him reproachfully.
"Oh, no," she answered.

"How could you think that?
But what has divorce to do with it?
Your granddaughter hasn't been divorced." A sound of disgust at the mere suggestion escaped him, and he said coldly: "My daughter divorced her first husband." "Oh, I did not know." "Against what, then, is this unconquerable prejudice of yours ?" "Against the daughters of the leisure class." He was still quite at sea.
"You dislike them ?" "I fear them." If she had said that she considered roses a menace, he could not have been more puzzled.

He repeated her words aloud, as if he hoped that they might have some meaning for him if he heard his own lips pronouncing them: "You fear them." "Yes," she went on, now interested only in expressing her belief, "I fear their ignorance and idleness and irresponsibility and self-indulgence, and, all the more because it is so delicate and attractive and unconscious; and their belief that the world owes them luxury and happiness without their lifting a finger.