The pleasure, like most pleasures, is greater
when it comes once in a way to a person unaccustomed to it. Janie Iver
had been brought up to know her own mind; it was the eleventh
commandment in the Iver household. Iver entertained the intellectual,
his wife the moral objection to shilly-shallying; their daughter's
training, while conducted with all kindness, had been eminently
sensible, and early days had offered few temptations to stray from the
path of the obviously desirable. The case was different now; riches
brought a change, the world revealed its resources, life was spreading
out its diverse wares. Janie was much puzzled as to what she ought to
do, more as to what she wanted to do, most of all as to what she would
in the end do--unless indeed the fact that she was puzzled continued to
rank as the greatest puzzle of all.

Naturally the puzzles were personified--or the persons made into
puzzles. Men became lives to her, as well as individuals--the Tristram,
the Duplay, the Broadley life; her opinion of the life complicated her
feeling toward the person. The Tristram life attracted her strongly, the
life of the great lady; Harry had his fascination too; but she did not
think that she and Harry would be very happy together, woman and man.
She was loth to let him go, with all that he meant; perhaps she would
have been secretly relieved if fate had taken him away from her. The
Duplay life promised another sort of joy: the Major's experience was
world-wide, his knowledge various, his conversation full of hints of the
unexplored; she would be broadening her life if she identified it with
his. Yet the Major was an approximate forty (on one side or the other),
in a few years would seem rather old, and was not even now capable of
raising a very strong sentiment; there too she would be taking rather
the life than the man. Lastly there was that quiet Broadley life, to be
transformed in some degree, doubtless, by her wealth, but likely to
remain in essentials the peaceful homely existence which she knew very
well. It had little to set against the rival prospects; yet there was a
feeling that in either of the other two existences she would miss
something; and that something seemed to be Bob Broadley himself.

She found herself thinking, in terms superficially repugnant to
convention, that she would like to pay long visits to the other men, but
have Bob to come home to when she was inclined for rest and
tranquillity. Her perpl