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“What do you mean by a crank?”

“I mean an extremist.”

Kitty laughed. “Weighty word! You’ll always have a world full of people who keep to the golden mean. Why bother yourself about me and Tolstoy?”

“I don’t, except when you bother me.”

“Poor man! It’s true this isn’t your fault. Still, you did provoke it by glaring at me. Why did you go to the concert?”

“I was dragged.”

“I might have known!” she chuckled, and shook her head. “No, you don’t give me any good reasons. Your morality seems to me the compromise of cowardice, apologetic and sneaking. When righteousness becomes alive and burning, you hate it as much as you do beauty. You want a little of each in your life, perhaps–adulterated, sterilized, with the sting taken out. It’s true enough they are both fearsome things when they get loose in the world; they don’t, often.”

McKann hated tall talk. “My views on women,” he said slowly, “are simple.”

“Doubtless,” Kitty responded dryly, “but are they consistent? Do you apply them to your stenographers as well as to me? I take it for granted you have unmarried stenographers. Their position, economically, is the same as mine.”

McKann studied the toe of her shoe. “With a woman, everything comes back to one thing.” His manner was judicial.

She laughed indulgently. “So we are getting down to brass tacks, eh? I have beaten you in argument, and now you are leading trumps.”

She put her hands behind her head and her lips parted in a half-yawn. “Does everything come back to one thing? I wish I knew! It’s more than likely that, under the same conditions, I should have been very like your stenographers–if they are good ones. Whatever I was, I would have been a good one. I think people are very much alike. You are more different than any one I have met for some time, but I know that there are a great many more at home like you. And even you–I believe there is a real creature down under these custom-made prejudices that save you the trouble of thinking. If you and I were shipwrecked on a desert island, I have no doubt that we would come to a simple and natural understanding. I’m neither a coward nor a shirk. You would find, if you had to undertake any enterprise of danger or difficulty with a woman, that there are several qualifications quite as important as the one to which you doubtless refer.”

McKann felt nervously for his watch-chain. “Of course,” he brought out, “I am not laying down any generalizations–” His brows wrinkled.

“Oh, aren’t you?” murmured Kitty. “Then I totally misunderstood. But remember”–holding up a finger–“it is you, not I, who are afraid to pursue this subject further. Now, I’ll tell you something.” She leaned forward and clasped her slim, white hands about her velvet knee. “I am as much a victim of these ineradicable prejudices as you. Your stenographer seems to you a better sort. Well, she does to me. Just because her life is, presumably, greyer than mine, she seems better. My mind tells me that dulness, and a mediocre order of ability, and poverty, are not in themselves admirable things. Yet in my heart I always feel that the sales-women in shops and the working girls in factories are more meritorious than I. Many of them, with my opportunities, would be more selfish than I am. Some of them, with their own opportunities, are more selfish. Yet I make this sentimental genuflection before the nun and the charwoman. Tell me, haven’t you any weakness? Isn’t there any foolish natural thing that unbends you a trifle and makes you feel gay?”

“I like to go fishing.”

“To see how many fish you can catch?”

“No, I like the woods and the weather. I like to play a fish and work hard for him. I like the pussy-willows and the cold; and the sky, whether it’s blue or grey–night coming on, every thing about it.”