“My dear Betty,” I interrupted with a laugh.  “You a barbarian?  You whom I regard as the last word, the last charming and delightful word, in modern womanhood?”

“Of course I’m the child of my century,” she cried, flushing.  “I want votes, freedom, opportunity for expansion, power—­everything that can develop Betty Connor into a human product worthy of the God who made her.  But how she could fulfil herself without the collaboration of a man, has baffled her ever since she was a girl of sixteen, when she began to awake to the modern movement.  On one side I saw women perfectly happy in the mere savage state of wifehood and motherhood, and not caring a hang for anything else, and on the other side women who threw babies back into limbo and preached of nothing but intellectual and political and economic independence.  Oh, I worried terribly about it, Majy, when I was a girl.  Each side seemed to have such a lot to say for itself.  Then it dawned upon me that the only way out of the dilemma was to combine both ideals—­that of the savage woman in skins and the lady professor in spectacles.  That is what, allowing for the difference of sex, a man does.  Why shouldn’t a woman?  The woman, of course, has to droop a bit more to the savage, because she has to produce the babies and suckle them, and so forth, and a man hasn’t.  That was my philosophy of life when I entered the world as a young woman.  Love came into it, of course.  It was a sanctification of the savagery.  I’ve gone on like this,” she laughed, “because I don’t want you to protest in your dear old-fashioned way against my calling myself an independent barbarian.  I am, and I glory in it.  That’s why, as I was saying, I’m deeply glad that Leonard Boyce has made good.  His honour means a good deal to me—­to my self-esteem.  I hope,” she added, rising and coming to me with a caressing touch.  “I hope you’ve got the hang of the thing now.”

Within myself I sincerely hoped I had.  If her sentiments were just as she analysed them, all was well.  If, on the other hand, the little demon of love for Boyce still lurked in her heart, in spite of the marriage and widowhood, there might be trouble ahead.  I remembered how once she had called him a devil.  I remembered, too, uncomfortably, the scrap of conversation I had overheard between Boyce and herself in the hall.  She had lashed him with her scorn, and he had taken his whipping without much show of fight.  Still, a woman’s love, especially that of a lady barbarian, was a curiously complex affair, and had been known to impel her to trample on a man one minute and the next to fall at his feet.  Now the worm she had trampled on had turned; stood erect as a properly authenticated hero.  I felt dubious as to the ensuing situation.

“I wrote to old Mrs. Boyce,” she added after a while.  “I thought it only decent.  I wrote yesterday, but only posted the letter to-day, so as to be sure I wasn’t acting on impulse.”