Soon afterwards she left the house, and Deborah came in to
him.
"She's gone home, eh?" asked Roger.
"Yes, she has, poor silly child--she said at first she had come here to
stay."
"By George," he said. "As bad as that?"
"Of course it isn't as bad as that!" Deborah cried impatiently. "She just
built and built on silly suspicions and let herself get all worked up! I
don't see what they're coming to!" For a few moments nothing was said.
"It's so unnatural!" she exclaimed. "Men and women weren't _made_ to live
like that!" Roger scowled into his paper.
"Better leave 'em alone," he admonished her. "You can't help--they're not
your kind. Don't you mix into this affair."
But Deborah did. She remembered that her sister had once shown quite a
talent for amateur theatricals; and to give Laura something to do, Deborah
persuaded her to take a dramatic club in her school. And Laura, rather to
Roger's surprise, became an enthusiast down there. She worked like a slave
at rehearsals, and upon the costumes she spent money with a lavish hand.
Moreover, instead of being annoyed, as Edith was, at Deborah's prominence
in the press, Laura gloried in it, as though this "radical" sister of hers
were a distinct social asset among her giddy friends uptown. 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.
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