My ladies silently consulted each other's expressions, after which, in equal silence, their gaze returned to me; but their equally intent scrutiny was expressive of quite different things. It was with expectancy that Mrs. Gregory looked at me—she wanted more. Not so Mrs. Weguelin; she gave me disapproval; it was shadowed in her beautiful, lustrous eyes that burned dark in her white face with as much fire as that of youth, yet it was not of youth, being deeply charged with retrospection.

In what, then, had I sinned? For the little lady's next words, coldly murmured, increased in me an uneasiness, as of sin:—

"You have told us much that we are not accustomed to hear in Kings Port."

"Oh, I haven't begun to tell you!" I exclaimed cheerily.

"You certainly have not told us," said Mrs. Gregory, "how your 'precocity' escapes this divorce degradation."

"Escape it? Those people think it is—well, provincial—not to have been divorced at least once!"

Mrs. Gregory opened her eyes, but Mrs. Weguelin shut her lips.

I continued: "Even the children, for their own little reasons, like it. Only last summer, in Newport, a young boy was asked how he enjoyed having a father and an ex-father."

"Ex-father!" said Mrs. Gregory. "Vice-father is what I should call him."

"Maria!" murmured Mrs. Weguelin, "how can you jest upon such topics?"

"I am far from jesting, Julia. Well, young gentleman, and what answer did this precious Newport child make?"

"He said (if you will pardon my giving you his little sentiment in his own quite expressive idiom), 'Me for two fathers! Double money birthdays and Christmases. See?' That was how he saw divorce."

Once again my ladies consulted each other's expressions; we moved along High Walk in such silence that I heard the stiff little rustle which the palmettos were making across the street; even these trees, you might have supposed, were whispering together over the horrors that I had recited in their decorous presence.

It was Mrs. Gregory who next spoke. "I can translate that last boy's language, but what did the other boy mean about a 'raid on Steel Preferred'—if I've got the jargon right?"

While I translated this for her, I felt again the disapproval in Mrs. Weguelin's dark eyes; and my sins—for they were twofold—were presently made clear to me by this lady.

"Are such subjects as—as stocks" (she softly cloaked this word in scorn immeasurable)—"are such subjects mentioned in your good society at the North?"

I laughed heartily. "Everything's mentioned!"

The lady paused over my reply. "I am afraid you must feel us to be very old-fashioned in, Kings Port," she then said.

"But I rejoice in it!"

She ignored my not wholly dexterous compliment. "And some subjects," she pursued, "seem to us so grave that if we permit ourselves to speak of them at all we cannot speak of them lightly."

No, they couldn't speak of them lightly! Here, then, stood my two sins revealed; everything I had imparted, and also my tone of imparting it, had displeased Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, not with the thing, but with me. I had transgressed her sound old American code of good manners, a code slightly pompous no doubt, but one in which no familiarity was allowed to breed contempt. To her good taste, there were things in the world which had, apparently, to exist, but which one banished from drawing-room discussion as one conceals from sight the kitchen and outhouses; one dealt with them only when necessity compelled, and never in small-talk; and here had I been, so to speak, small-talking them in that glib, modern, irresponsible cadence with which our brazen age rings and clatters like the beating of triangles and gongs. Not triangles and gongs, but rather strings and flutes, had been the music to which Kings Port society had attuned its measured voice.