e desolately: "I've known it from the
first, and I've felt it all the time. It's all a mistake, and has been.
We never could understand each other. We're too different."

"That needn't prevent you understanding him. It needn't prevent you from
seeing how really kind and good he is--how faithful and constant he is."

"Oh, you say that--you praise him--because you like him."

"Of course I do. And can't you?"

"No. The least grain of deceit--of temporising, you call it--spoils
everything. It's over," said the girl, rising, with a sigh, from the
chair she had dropped into. "We're best apart; we could only have been
wretched and wicked together."

"What did you say to him, Alice?" asked her mother, unshaken by her
rhetoric.

"I told him he was a faithless person."

"Then you were a cruel girl," cried Mrs. Pasmer, with sudden
indignation; "and if you were not my daughter I could be glad he had
escaped you. I don't know where you got all those silly, romantic
notions of yours about these things. You certainly didn't get them from
me," she continued, with undeniable truth, "and I don't believe you
get them from your Church, It's just as Miss Anderson said: your Church
makes allowance for human nature, but you make none."

"I shouldn't go to Julia Anderson for instruction in such matters," said
the girl, with cold resentment.

"I wish you would go to her for a little commonsense--or somebody," said
Mrs. Pasmer. "Do you know what talk this will make?"

"I don't care for the talk. It would be worse than talk to marry a man
whom I couldn't trust--who wanted to please me so much that he had to
deceive me, and was too much afraid of me to tell me the truth."

"You headstrong girl!" said her mother impartially, admiring at the same
time the girl's haughty beauty.

There was an argument in reserve in Mrs. Pasmer's mind which perhaps
none but an American mother would have hesitated to urge; but it is so
wholly our tradition to treat the important business of marriage as a
romantic episode that even she could not bring herself to insist that
her daughter should not throw away a chance so advantageous from
every worldly point of view. She could only ask, "If you break this
engagement, what do you expect to do?"

"The engagement is broken. I shall go into a sisterhood."

"You will do nothing of the kind, with my consent," said Mrs. Pasmer. "I
will have no such nonsense. Don't flatter yourself that I will. Even if
I approve