Cope Among Crosscurrents by Henry Blake Fuller

Next morning, at breakfast, Amy Leffingwell kept, for the most part, a rapt and meditative eye on her plate. Hortense gave her now and then an impatient, half-angry glare, and had to be cut short in some stinging observations on Cope. "But it was foolish," Medora Phillips felt obliged to concede. "What in the world made you do it?"

But Amy continued to smile at the tablecloth. She seemed to be intimating that there was a special folly which transcended mere general folly and approximated wisdom.