For even Laura's friends, her father learned with astonishment, had acquired quite an appetite for men and women with ideas--the more "radical," the better.
But the way Laura used this word at times made Roger's blood run cold.

She was vivid in her approval of her sister's whole idea, as a scheme of wholesale motherhood which would give "a perfectly glorious jolt" to the old-fashioned home with its overworked mothers who let their children absorb their days.
"As though having children and bringing them up," she disdainfully declared, "were something every woman must do, whether she happens to like it or not, at the cost of any real growth of her own!" And smilingly she hinted at impending radical changes in the whole relation of marriage, of which she was hearing in detail at a series of lectures to young wives, delivered on Thursday mornings in a hotel ball-room.
What the devil was getting into the town?
Roger frowned his deep dislike.
Here was Laura with her chicken's mind blithely taking her sister's thoughts and turning them topsy-turvy, to make for herself a view of life which fitted like a white kid glove her small and elegant "menage." And although her father had only inklings of it all, he had quite enough to make him irate at this uncanny interplay of influences in his family.

Why couldn't the girls leave each other alone?
* * * * * Early in the winter, Edith, too, had entered in.

It had taken Edith just one glance into the bride's apartment to grasp Laura's whole scheme of existence.
"Selfish, indulgent and abnormal," was the way she described it.

She and Bruce were dining with Roger that night.