The proud, fastidious woman had given the girl her confidence--eagerly, indiscriminately.

She had poured out upon her all that wild philosophy of "rights" which is still struggling in the modern mind with a crumbling ethic and a vanishing religion.

And she had found in Daphne a warm and passionate ally.

Daphne was nothing if not "advanced." She shrank, as Roger Barnes had perceived, from no question; she had never been forbidden, had never forbidden herself, any book that she had a fancy to read; and she was as ready to discuss the relative divorce laws of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, as the girls of fifty years ago were to talk of the fashions, or "Evangeline." In any disputed case, moreover, between a man and a woman, Daphne was hotly and instinctively on the side of the woman.

She had thrown herself, therefore, with ardour into the defence of Mrs.Verrier; and for her it was not the wife's desertion, but the husband's suicide which had been the cruel and indefensible thing.