He held it there a moment.
"Let us go off and have a jolly little dinner at a restaurant," he
proposed.
There had been a time when such a suggestion would have surprised
her to the verge of disapproval; but now she agreed to it at once.
"Oh, that would be so nice," she murmured with a great sigh of
relief and assuagement.
Jane had fulfilled her mission after all: she had drawn them
together at last.
THE RECKONING
I
"THE marriage law of the new dispensation will be: _Thou shalt not
be unfaithful--to thyself_."
A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the
haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband
descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a
congratulatory group of ladies. Westall's informal talks on "The New
Ethics" had drawn about him an eager following of the mentally
unemployed--those who, as he had once phrased it, liked to have
their brain-food cut up for them. The talks had begun by accident.
Westall's ideas were known to be "advanced," but hitherto their
advance had not been in the direction of publicity. He had been, in
his wife's opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not to let his
personal views endanger his professional standing. Of late, however,
he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the
gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the
relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a
few admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner
opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a series of
talks at the Van Sideren studio.
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