And she said: "Girls, I will tell you an awful secret. I never would have consented to this, but as long as Lee and Gay have gone and done it, I'm—glad."

"The only thing I mind," said Eve, "is Arthur. He'll take it hard."

"We can't help that," said Maud. "Business is business. And this wretched, shocking piece of mischief spells success. I feel it in my bones. There's no use being silly about ourselves. We've got our way to make in the world—and, as a sextet—"

She lingered over the picture.

"As a sextet, there's no use denying that we are rather lovely to look at."

Phyllis put in a word blindly.

"Maud," she said, "among the applications you have received, how many are from women?"

Maud laughed aloud.

"None," she said.

"There wouldn't be," said Eve.

"Well," said Mary, "compared to the rest of you, I'm quite an old woman, and I say—so much the better."

Chapter V

*

Even on going into the open air from a warmed room, it would not have struck you as a cold day. But thermometers marked a number of degrees worse than zero. The sky was bright and blue. Not a breath of wind stirred. In the woods the underbrush was hidden by the smooth accumulations of snow, so that the going was open.

The Adirondack winter climate is such that a man runs less risk of getting too cold than of getting too warm. Arthur, moving swiftly in a great circle so that at some point he should come upon the tracks of his culprit sisters, shed first his mittens and then his coat. The former he thrust into his trousers pocket, and he hung the latter to a broken limb where he could easily find it on his return.

"There would be some sense in running away in summer," he thought. "It would take an Indian or a dog to track them then, but in winter—I gave them credit for more sense."

He came upon the outgoing marks of their snow-shoes presently, just beyond Phyllis's garden, to the north of the camp. In imagination he saw the two lithe young beauties striding sturdily and tirelessly over the snow, and then and there the extreme pinnacles of his anger toppled and fell. There is no occupation to which a maiden may lend herself so virginal as woodmanship. And he fell to thinking less of his young sisters' indiscretion than of the extreme and unsophisticated innocence which had led them into it. What could girls know of men, anyway? What did his sisters know of him? That he had been extravagant and rather fast. Had they an inkling of what being rather fast meant? His smooth forehead contracted with painful thoughts. Even Mary's indignation upon the discovery of the photograph in The Four Seasons had not matched his own. She had been angry because she was a gentlewoman, and gentlewomen shun publicity. She had not even guessed at the degradation to which broadcast pictures of beautiful women are subjected. His anger turned from his sisters presently and glowered upon the whole world of men; his hands closed to strike, and opened to clutch and choke. That Lee and Gay had done such a thing was earnest only of innocence coupled with mischief. They must know that what they had done was wrong, since they had fled from any immediate consequences, but how wrong it was they could never dream, even in nightmares. Nor was it possible for him to explain. How, then, could any anger which he might visit upon them benefit? And who was he, when it came to that, to assume the unassailable morality of a parent?