"Probably immoral people," said Sylvia indifferently. "Drop it on the coals, Grace."
But Mrs. Ferrall reopened the book where she had laid her finger to mark the place. "Do you think so?" she asked.
"Think what?"
"That rotten books and plays come from morally rotten people?"
"I don't think about it at all," observed Sylvia, opening another letter impatiently.
"You're probably not very literary," said Grace mischievously.
"Not in that way, I suppose."
Mrs. Ferrall took another bonbon: "Did you see 'Mrs. Lane's Experiment'?"
"I did," said Sylvia, looking up, the pink creeping into her cheeks.
"You thought it very strong, I suppose?" asked Grace innocently.
"I thought it incredible."
"But, dear, it was sheer realism! Why blink at truth? And when an author has the courage to tell facts why not have the courage to applaud?"
"If that is truth, it doesn't concern me," said Sylvia. "Grace, why will you pose, even if you are married? for you have a clean mind, and you know it!"
"I know it," sighed Mrs. Ferrall, closing her book again, but keeping the place with her finger; "and that's why I'm so curious about all these depraved people. I can't understand why writers have not found out that we women are instinctively innocent, even after we are obliged to make our morality a profession and our innocence an art. They all hang their romances to motives that no woman recognises as feminine; they ascribe to us instincts which we do not possess, passions of which we are ignorant--a ridiculous moral turpitude in the overmastering presence of love. Pooh! If they only knew what a small part love plays with us, after all!"
Sylvia said slowly: "It sometimes plays a small part, after all."
"Always," insisted Grace with emphasis. "No carefully watched girl knows what it is, whatever her suspicions may be. When she marries, if she doesn't marry from family pressure or from her own motives of common-sense ambition, she marries because she likes the man, not because she loves him."
Sylvia was silent.
"Because, even if she wanted to love him," continued Grace, "she would not know how. It's the ingrained innocence which men encounter that they don't allow for or understand in us. Even after we are married, and whether or not we learn to love our husbands, it remains part of us as an educated instinct; and it takes all the scientific, selfish ruthlessness of a man to break it down. That's why I say so few among us ever comprehend the motives attributed to us in romance or in that parody of it called realism. Love is rarer with us than men could ever believe--and I'm glad of it," she said maliciously, with a final snap of her pretty teeth.