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room, went over to her dresser, and stood with her hands on the cheap scarf—she must dress to receive Mr. Belshue. With a deep sigh she went to her trunk, opened it, and stood thinking which of her two dresses to wear. She had two, a revealing lawn of pale blue, open of throat and with sheer sleeves, and a gray travelling dress. As she looked at the gray dress she was moved to swathe herself in it against Belshue, but that would have been absurd for evening wear. The conventions of women always override any impulse toward modesty which may untowardly arise in a particular member of the sex.

Under the gray dress lay a novel which Nessie had been reading. As she picked this up, the contrast between the pure-hearted heroine and her own ambivalent mood dawned on Nessie for the first time. She herself was pure perhaps, but not single-hearted. She was not perfect, impeccable, as was the heroine of the romance in her hands. The hero of the book was a handsome drunken gambler. It was the sort of fiction which flooded the South during a period just preceding the Civil War. All the heroes of this period were idle young men given to drinking, gambling, and venery. These novels, all written by women, represented the only point of view which a woman could take of such a type and still accept him for a husband. They were written straight out of a defensive complex and contained a bitter veracity beneath their high-flown sentimentalism.

Nessie laid out her blue lawn, and still feeling tall and insecurely poised, began taking down her yellow hair.