in itself--and he was so obtrusively
truthful.

In a lover, as yet unaccepted, she felt this last quality to be
embarrassing. It made him incapable of comprehending those fine shades
of flirtation by which a clever woman indicates "she will, and she
will not," by which she hesitates a liking, and provokes the
admiration she can either refuse or accept. If she looked at Antony,
with a sweet, long gaze, and then sighed, and cast her eyes down,
Antony was moved to the depths of his soul, and he would frankly tell
her so; which at that stage of proceedings was very inconvenient. If
she permitted him to hold her hand, and walk with her in silent bliss
under the stars, she was compelled at their next meeting to set him
back with a cruel determination he could neither gainsay nor complain
of. He was happy, and he was wretched. Often he determined to return
westward forever, and then in some of the occult ways known to
womanhood, Rose tied him to her side by another knot, more invisible
and more invincible than the rest.

She loved him. She was resolved to marry him--sometime. "But I want
one more season in society," she said to herself, one day, as she
reviewed the position in her luxurious solitude--"though for the
matter of that, it is the young married women now who have all the
beaux, and all the fun. And if I were married, I should be safe from
Dick; and I am afraid of Dick. Dick isn't good; on the contrary, he is
very bad. I like good men. I like Antony Van Hoosen. I will let him
propose to me. If I were engaged, or supposed to be engaged, all the
young men would immediately fancy I was the only girl in the
universe--but I never can find another lover like Antony Van Hoosen!
The man would die for me."

She talked of him continually to Adriana, and hoped that Adriana would
say to Antony the things she did not herself wish to say. She gave
Adriana hopes that Adriana might give them to Antony. And then
Adriana was so provokingly honorable as to regard the confidence as
inviolable. And, indeed, Antony was that kind of a lover who thinks it
a kind of sacrilege to babble about his mistress, or to speculate
concerning her feelings, even with his sister. His love, with all of
joy and sorrow it caused him, was a subject sacred as his own soul to
him.

Of course, Mrs. Filmer was not blind to events so closely within her
observation; she was far too shrewdly alive to all of life's
possibilities to ignore them. But she did not