Gertrude!" called out her mother to the girl, as she passed the library door. "Gertrude! come in, your father and I wish to talk with you."

"Committee meeting?" laughed Gertrude, as she took a seat beside her father. It had grown to be rather a joke in the family to speak of Mr. Avery's calls as committee meetings, and Mr. Foster had tried vainly to tease his daughter about it.

"In my time," he would say, "we did not go a courting to get advice. we went for kisses. I never discussed any more profound topic with my sweetheart than love—and perhaps poetry and music. Sometimes, as I sit and listen to you two, I can't half believe that you are lovers. It's so perfectly absurd. You talk about everything on earth. It's a deal more like—why I should have looked upon that sort of thing as a species of committee meeting, in my day."

Gertrude had laughed and said something about thinking that love ought to enter into and run through all the interests of life, and not be held merely as a thing apart. All women had a life to live. All would not have the love. So the first problem was one of life and its work. The love was only a phase of this. But her father had gone on laughing at her about her queer love-making.

"Committee meeting?" asked she, again, as she glanced at her father, smiling dryly. Her mother answered first.

"Yes—no—partly. Your father wanted to speak to you about—he thinks you should not be seen with, or have those girls—You tell her yourself, dear," she said, appealing to her husband. Mr. Foster was fidgeting about in his chair; he had not felt comfortable before. He was less so now, for Gertrude had turned her face full upon him, and her hand was on his sleeve.

"'Well, there's nothing to tell, Gertrude," he said. "I guess you can understand it without a scene. I simply don't want to see those girls—that King girl and her friend—about here any more. It won't do. It simply won't do at all. You'll be talked about. Of course, I know it is all very kind of you, and all that, and that you don't mean any harm; but men always have drawn, and they always will draw, unpleasant conclusions. They may sympathize with that sort of girls, but they simply won't stand having their own women folks associate with them. The test of the respectability of a woman, is whether a man of position will marry her or not. A man's respectable if he's out of jail. A woman if she is marriageable or married. Now, unfortunately, that little Berton girl is neither the one nor the other, and its going to make talk if you are seen with her again. She must stay away from here, too."

There had come a most unusual tone of protest into his voice as he went on, but he had looked steadily at a carved paper knife, which he held in his hand, and with which he cut imaginary leaves upon the table. There was a painful silence. Gertrude thought she did not remember having ever before heard her father speak so sharply. She glanced at her mother, but Katherine Foster had evidently made up her mind to leave this matter entirely in the hands of her husband.

"Do you mean, papa, that you wish me to tell that child, Ettie Berton, not to come here any more, and that I must not befriend her?" asked Gertrude, in an unsteady voice.

"Befriend her all you've a mind to," responded her father, heartily. "Certainly. Of course. But don't have her come here, and don't you be seen with her, nor the other one again. You can send James or Susan —better not send Susan though—send James with money or anything you want to give her. Your mother tells me you are paying the Berton girl's board. That's all right if you want to, but—your mother has told me the whole outrageous story, and that cashier ought to be shot, but—"

"But instead of helping make the public opinion which would make him less, and Ettie more, respectable, you ask me to help along the present infamous order of things! Oh, papa! don't ask that of me! I have never willingly done anything in my life that I knew you disapproved. Don't ask me to help crush that child now, for I cannot. I cannot desert her now. Don't ask that of me, papa. Why do men—even you good men—make it so hard, so almost impossible for women to be kind to each other? What has Ettie done that such as we should hold her to account. She is a mere child. Fourteen years old in fact, but not over ten in feeling or judgment. She has been deceived by one who fully understood. She did not. And yet even you ask me to hold her responsible! Oh, papa, don't!" She slipped onto her father's knee and took his face in her hands and kissed his forehead. She had never in her life stood against her father or seemed to criticise him before. It hurt her and it vexed him. A little frown came on his face. "Katherine," he said, turning to his wife, "I wish you'd make Gertrude understand this thing rationally. You always have." Mrs. Foster glanced at her daughter and then at her husband. She smiled.

"I always have, what dear?" she asked.

"Understood these things as I do—as everyone does," said her husband. "You never took these freaks that Gertrude is growing into, and—"

The daughter winced and sat far back on her father's knee. Her mother did not miss the action. She smiled at the girl, but her voice was steady, and less light than usual.

"No, I never took freaks, as you say, but what I thought of things, or how I may or may not have understood them, dear, no one ever inquired, no one ever cared to know. That I acted like other people, and acquiesced in established opinions, went without saying. That was expected of me. That I did. Gertrude belongs to another generation, dear. She cannot be so colorless as we women of my time—"

Her husband laughed.

"Colorless, is good, by Jove! You colorless indeed!" He looked admiringly at his wife. "Why, Katherine, you have more color and more sense now than any half dozen girls of this generation. Colorless indeed!" Mrs. Foster smiled. "Don't you think my cheerful, easy reflection of your own shades of thought or mind have always passed current as my own? Sometimes I fancy that is true, and that—it is easier and—pleasanter all around. But—" she paused. "It was not my color, my thought, my opinions, myself. It was an echo, dear; a pleasant echo of yourself which has so charmed you. It was not I."

Gertrude felt uneasy, and as if she were lifting a curtain which had been long drawn. Her father turned his face towards her and then toward her mother.

"In God's name what does all this mean?" he asked. "Are you, the most level-headed woman in the world, intending to uphold Gertrude in this—suicidal policy—her—this—absurd nonsense about that girl?"

Gertrude's eyes widened. She slowly arose from his knee. The revelation as to her father's mental outlook was, to her more sensitive and developed nature, much what the one had been to Francis King that night at the club.

"Oh, papa," she said softly. "I am so sorry for—so sorry—for us all. We seem so far apart, and—"

"John Martin agrees with me perfectly," said her father, hotly. "I talked with him to-day. He—"

Gertrude glanced at her mother, and there was a definite curl upon her lip. "Mr. Martin," she said slowly, "is not a conscience for me. He and I are leagues apart, papa. We—"

"More's the pity," said her father, as he arose from his chair. He moved toward the door.

"I've said my say, Gertrude. It's perfectly incomprehensible to me what you two are aiming at. But what I know is this: you must do my way in this particular case, think whatever you please. You know very well I would not ask it except for your own good. I don't like to interfere with your plans, but—you must give that girl up." He spoke kindly, but Gertrude and her mother sat silent long after he had gone. The twilight had passed into darkness. Presently Katherine's voice broke the silence:—

"Shall you float with the tide, daughter, or shall you try to swim up stream?" She was thinking of the first talk they had ever had on these subjects, nearly two years ago now, but the girl recognized the old question. She stood up slowly and then with quick steps came to her mother's side.

"Don't try to swim with me, mamma. It only makes it harder for me to see you hurt in the struggle. Don't try to help me any more when the eddies come. Float, mamma; I shall swim. I shall! I shall! And while my head is above the waves that poor little girl shall not sink."

She was stroking Katherine's hair, and her mother's hand drew her own down to a soft cheek.

"Am I right, mother?" she asked, softly. "If you say I am right, it is enough. My heart will ache to seem to papa to do wrong, but I can bear it better than I could bear my own self-contempt. Am I right, mamma?"

Her mother drew her hand to her lips, and then with a quick action she threw both arms about the girl and whispered in her ear: "I shall go back to the old way. Swim if you can, daughter. You are right. If only you are strong enough. That is the question. If only you are strong enough. I am not. I shall remain in the old way." There was a steadiness and calm in her voice which matched oddly enough with the fire in her eyes and the flush on her cheeks.

"Little mother, little mother," murmured Gertrude, softly, as she stroked her mother's hand. Then she kissed her and left the room. "With her splendid spirit, that she should be broken on the wheel!" the girl said aloud to herself, when she had reached her own room. She did not light the gas, but sat by the window watching the passers-by in the street.

"Why should papa have sent me to college," she was thinking, "where I matched my brains and thoughts with men, if I was to stifle them later on, and subordinate them to brains I found no better than my own? Why should my conscience be developed, if it must not be used; if I must use as my guide the conscience of another? Why should I have a separate and distinct nature in all things, if I may use only that part of it which conforms to those who have not the same in type or kind? I will do what seems right to myself. I shall not desert—"

She laid her cheek in her hand and sighed. A new train of thought was rising. It had never come to her before.

"It is my father's money. He says I may send it, but I may not—it is my father's money. He has the right to say how it may be used, and—and—" (the blood was coming into her face) "I have nothing but what he gives me. He wants a pleasant home; he pays for it. Susan and James, and the rest, he hires to conduct the labor of the house. If they do not do it to please him—if they are not willing to—they have no right to stay, and then to complain. For his social life at home he has mamma and me. If he wants—" She was walking up and down the room now. "Have we a right to dictate? We have our places in his home. We are not paid wages like James and Susan, but—but—we are given what we have; we are dependent. He has never refused us anything—any sum we wanted—but he can. It is in his power, and really we do not know but that he should. Perhaps we spend too much. We do not know. What can he afford? I do not know. What can I afford?" She spread her hands out before her, palms up, in the darkness. She could see them by the flicker of the electric light in the street.

"They are empty," she said, aloud, "and they are untrained, and they are helpless. They are a pauper's hands." She smiled a little at the conceit, and then, slowly: "It sounds absurd, almost funny, but it is true. A pauper in lace and gold! I am over twenty-two. I am as much a dependent and a pauper as if I were in a poorhouse. Love and kindness save me! They have not saved Ettie, nor Francis. When the day came they were compelled to yield utterly, or go. They can work, and I? I am a dependent. Have I a right to stand against the will and pleasure of my father, when by doing so I compel him to seem to sustain and support that which he disapproves? Have I a right to do that?"

She was standing close to the window now, and she put her hot face against the glass. "The problem is easy enough, if all think alike—if one does not think at all; but now? I cannot follow my own conscience and my father's too. We do not think alike. Is it right that I should, to buy his approval and smiles, violate my own mind, and brain, and heart? But is it right for me to violate his sense of what is right, while I live upon the lavish and loving bounty which he provides?" And so, with her developed conscience, and reason, and individuality, Gertrude had come to face the same problem, which, in its more brutal form, had resulted so sorrowfully for the two girls whom she had hoped to befriend. The ultimate question of individual domination of one by another, with the purse as the final appeal—and even this strong and fortunate girl wavered. "Shall I swim, after all? Have I the right to try?" she asked herself.