ng its pages back and forth
while she sought for an end of the tangled skein of her thoughts to
hold on by.

Finally, "Do you want me to marry him, dad?" she asked. Then, before he
could answer she hurried on. "I mean, would it relieve you from some
nightmare worry about me if I did?--This has to be plain talk, doesn't
it, if it is to get us anywhere?"

"That's a fair question of yours," he said. But he wasn't ready at once
with an answer. "It _would_ be such a relief, provided you really wanted
to marry him. That goes to the bottom of it, I think. My responsibility
is to make it possible for you to--follow your heart. To marry or not as
you wish. To marry a poor man if you wish. But if Graham is your choice
and all that holds you back from him is some remediable
misunderstanding--or failure to understand ..."

"I don't know whether it's remediable or not," she said; and added, "I
told him I would marry him if I could. Did he tell you that?"

It was a mistake to have quoted that expression to her father. He took
it just as Graham had. Of course! What else could he think? She sat with
clenched hands and a dry throat, listening while he tried to enlighten
what he took to be her innocent misunderstanding.

They had never spoken, she realized, about matters of sex. For anything
he really knew to the contrary she might have been as ignorant as a
child. He was actually talking as one talks to a child;--kindly,
tolerantly, tenderly, but with an unconscious touch of patronage, like
one trying to explain away--misgivings about Santa Claus! There were
elements, inevitably, in a man's love for a woman, that a young girl
could not understand. Nothing but experience could bring that
understanding home to her. This was what in one way after another, he was
trying to convey.

But the intuition which, in good times or bad, always betrayed their
emotions to each other, showed him that he was, somehow missing the mark.
Her silence through his tentative little pauses disconcerted him heavily.
He ran down at last like an unwound clock.

It was only after a long intolerably oppressive silence that she found
her voice. "The misunderstanding isn't what you think," she said. "Nor
what Graham thinks. It's his misunderstanding, not mine. He thinks that I
am--a sort of innocent angel that he's not good enough for. And the fact
is that I'm not--not innocent enough for him. Not an angel at all. Not
even quite--good."

But she got no furth