'?" he repeated. "What would
it mean to you if you had it?"

"Life!" she answered. "I am only a dead machine, except when I am
living out my true self."

He deliberately placed his hand on hers as it lay on the table. "You
make me want to clasp hands with you. Do you realize what a big truth
you have gotten hold of--and all that it involves?"

"I only know what it means to me."

"You are not free to be yourself?"

"I have never drawn a natural breath except in secret."

Tillie's face was glowing. Scarcely did she know herself in this
wonderful experience of speaking freely, face to face, with one who
understood.

"My own recent experiences of life," he said gravely, "have brought me,
too, to realize that it is death in life not to be true to one's self.
But if you wait for the FREEDOM to be so--" he shrugged his shoulders.
"One always has that freedom if he will take it--at its fearful cost.
To be uncompromisingly and always true to one's self simply means
martyrdom in one form or another."

He, too, marveled that he should have found any one in this household
to whom he could speak in such a vein as this.

"I always thought," Tillie said, "that when I was enough educated to be
a teacher and be independent of father, I would be free to live truly.
But I see that YOU cannot. You, too, have to hide your real self. Else
you could not stay here in New Canaan."

"Or anywhere else, child," he smiled. "It is only with the rare few
whom one finds on one's own line of march that one can be absolutely
one's self. Your secret life, Miss Tillie, is not unique."

A fascinating little brown curl had escaped from Tillie's cap and lay
on her cheek, and she raised her hand to push it back where it
belonged, under its snowy Mennonite covering.

"Don't!" said Fairchilds. "Let it be. It's pretty!"

Tillie stared up at him, a new wonder in her eyes.

"In that Mennonite cap, you look like--like a Madonna!" Almost
unwittingly the words had leaped from his lips; he could not hold them
back. And in uttering them, it came to him that in the freedom
permissible to him with an unsophisticated but interesting and gifted
girl like this--freedom from the conventional restraints which had
always limited his intercourse with the girls of his own social
world--there might be possible a friendship such as he had never known
except with those of his own sex--and with them but rarely. The thought
cheered him mightily; for his life in New