But I hope you don't mind if I'm a bit sorry for the
boy, for, you know,"--in a lower voice, and with a stealthy look at
her,--"Jack's the nearest thing to a son I've ever had."

She did not answer. In the silence that ensued an uneasiness crept
into his manner.

"Caroline," bracing himself, "there is something--something you were
perhaps not expecting to hear--that I must tell you."

"I trust, Judge Harvey,"--somewhat stiffly,--"that you are not about
to propose to me again."

"I am not." His face flushed; then set grimly. "But I'm going to
again, sometime, and I'd do it now if I thought it would do any good."

"It will not."

"Oh, I know I wouldn't fit into your present scheme of life."
Bitterness and contempt had risen like a tide in the Judge's voice. "I
know I'm no social figure; at least, not up to your dimensions. I know
it would be a come-down to change from Mrs. De Peyster to Mrs. Harvey.
Not that I'm so infernally humble, Caroline, that I don't consider
myself a damned lot better than most of the men you might possibly
think about marrying."

He rose abruptly, and with a groaning burst of impatience that had
a tinge of anger: "Oh, for God's sake, Caroline, why don't you throw
overboard all this fashionable business, this striving to keep an
empty position, and be--and be--"

"And be what?" put in Mrs. De Peyster with glittering eye.

"And be just yourself!" he cried defiantly, squarely facing her.
"There, at last I've said it! And I'm going to say the rest of it.
This Mrs. De Peyster that heads everything isn't at all the simple,
natural gracious Carrie De Peyster that John De Peyster and I made
love to! You're not the real Mrs. De Peyster; you only think you are.
This Mrs. De Peyster the world knows is something that's been built
by and out of the obligation which you accepted to maintain the De
Peyster dignity. She's only a surface, a shell, a mask! If your mother
hadn't died, and then your mother-in-law, and thrown upon you this
whole infernal family business and this infernal social leadership,
why, you'd have been an entirely different person--"

"Judge Harvey!"

"You'd then have been the real Mrs. De Peyster!" he rushed hotly on.
"Oh, all this show, this struggle for place, this keeping up a front,
I know it's only a part of the universal comedy of our pretending to
be what we're not,--every one of us is doing the same, in a big way,
or a little way,--but it makes me sick! For God's sake,