Also, she saw that she was well into that
time of life where the absence of reputation in a woman
endangers her comfort, makes her liable to be left alone
--not despised and denounced, but simply avoided and
ignored. So she was telling Mildred the exact truth.
She had laid down the arms she had taken up against
the social system, and had come in--and was fighting
it from the safer and wiser inside. She still insisted
that a woman had the same rights as a man; but she took
care to make it clear that she claimed those rights only
for others, that she neither exercised them nor cared for
them for herself. And to make her propaganda the
more effective, she was not only circumspect herself,
but was exceedingly careful to be surrounded by
circumspect people. No one could cite her case as proof
that woman would expand liberty into license. In
theory there was nothing lively that she did not look
upon at least with tolerance; in practice, more and more
she disliked seeing one of her sex do anything that might
cause the world to say ``woman would abuse liberty if
she had it.
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