Moreover, if these things ought to be probed--and Janet was not of serious opinion that they ought to be--for her part she preferred to obtain advices thereon from between admissible and respectable book-covers.
It hurt her to hear them drop from Elfrida's lips--lips so plainly meant for all tenderness.

Janet had an instinct of helpless anger when she heard them; the woman in her rose in protest, less on behalf of her sex than on behalf of Elfrida herself, who seemed so blind, so willing to revile, so anxious to reject.

"Do you really hope you will marry ?" Elfrida had asked her once; and Janet had answered candidly, "Of course I do, and I want to die a grandmother too." "_Vraiment!_" exclaimed Miss Bell ironically, with a little shudder of disgust, "I hope you may!" That was in the very beginning of their friendship, however, and so vital a subject could not remain, outside the relations which established themselves more and more intimately between them as the days went on.

Janet began to find herself constantly in the presence of a temptation to bring the matter home to Elfrida personally in one way or another, as young women commonly do with other young women who are obstinately unorthodox in these things--to say to her in effect, "Your turn will come when _he_ comes! These pseudo-philosophies will vanish when _he_ looks at them, like snow in spring.

You will succumb--you will succumb!" But she never did.