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you."
    Nona made an impatient gesture. "Stan bores me."
    "Ah, well, I suppose he's not enough of a novelty. Or not up–to–
date enough; YOUR dates. Some of his ideas seem to me pretty
subversive; but I suppose in your set and Lita's a young man who
doesn't jazz all day and drink all night—or vice versa—is a back
number."
    The girl did not take this up, and after a moment Wyant continued,
in his half–mocking half–querulous voice: "Or is it that he isn't
'psychic' enough? That's the latest, isn't it? When you're not
high–kicking you're all high–thinking; and that reminds me of
Stan's news—"
    "Yes?" Nona brought it out between parched lips. Her gaze turned
from Wyant to the coals smouldering in the grate. She did not want
to face any one just then.
    "Well, it seems there's going to be a gigantic muck–raking—one of
the worst we've had yet. Into this Mahatma business; you know, the
nigger chap your mother's always talking about. There's a hint of
it in the last number of the 'Looker–on'; here … where is it?
Never mind, though. What it says isn't a patch on the real facts,
Stan tells me. It seems the goings–on in that School of Oriental
Thought—what does he call the place: Dawnside?—have reached such
a point that the Grant Lindons, whose girl has been making a
'retreat' there, or whatever they call it, are out to have a
thorough probing. They say the police don't want to move because
so many people we know are mixed up in it; but Lindon's back is up,
and he swears he won't rest till he gets the case before the Grand
Jury…"
    As Wyant talked, the weight lifted from Nona's breast. Much she
cared for the Mahatma, or for the Grant Lindons! Stuffy old–
fashioned people—she didn't wonder Bee Lindon had broken away from
such parents—though she was a silly fool, no doubt. Besides, the
Mahatma certainly had reduced Mrs. Manford's hips—and made her
less nervous too: for Mrs. Manford sometimes WAS nervous, in spite
of her breathless pursuit of repose. Not, of course, in the same
querulous uncontrolled way as poor Arthur Wyant, who had never been
taught poise, or mental uplift, or being in tune with the Infinite;
but rather as one agitated by the incessant effort to be calm. And
in that respect the Mahatma's rhythmic exercises had without doubt
been helpful. No; Nona didn't care a fig for scandals about the
School of Oriental Thought. And the relief of finding that the
subject she had dreaded to hear broached had probably never even
come to Wyant's ears, gave her a reaction of light–heartedness.
    There were moments when Nona felt oppressed by responsibilities and
anxieties not of her age, apprehensions that she could not shake
off and yet had not enough experience of life to know how to meet.
One or two of her girl friends—in the brief intervals between
whirls and thrills—had confessed to the same vague disquietude.
It was as if, in the beaming determination of the middle–aged, one
and all of them, to ignore sorrow and evil, "think them away" as
superannuated bogies, survivals of some obsolete European
superstition unworthy of enlightened Americans, to whom plumbing
and dentistry had given higher standards, and bi–focal glasses a
clearer view of the universe—as if the demons the elder generation
ignored, baulked of their natural prey, had cast their hungry
shadow over the young. After all, somebody in every family had to
remember now and then that such things as wickedness, suffering and
death had not yet been banished from the earth; and with all those
bright–complexioned white–haired mothers mailed in massage and
optimism, and behaving as if they had never heard of anything but
the Good and the Beautiful, perhaps their children had to serve as
vicarious sacrifices. There were hours when Nona Manford,
bewildered little Iphigenia, uneasily argued in this way: others
when youth and inexperience reasserted themselves, and the load
slipped from her, and she wondered why she didn't always