rather like asking for a field-marshal's baton
and a curveting charger--and getting instead a musket and place in the
ranks. The man who doesn't serve where he's put isn't much good...." He
paused and then went on calmly, "What is this thing that haunts you?"

"When I finished at the preparatory school," she began, "father thought
I'd gone far enough and I _knew_ I needed college. At last I won a
compromise. I was to have one year by way of trial, and then he was to
decide which idea was right--his or mine."

"So now--"

"So now the jury has the case--and I'm terribly afraid I know the
verdict in advance. Father is a minister of the old school and the
unyielding New England type. I don't remember my mother, but sometimes I
think the inflammatory goodness at home killed her. In our house you
mustn't question a hell where Satan reigns as a personal god of
Damnation. To doubt his spiked tail and cloven hoofs, would almost be
heresy. That's our sort of goodness."

"And colleges fail to supply a course in the Chemistry of Brimstone," he
suggested.

"They don't even frown on such ungodly things as socialism and
suffrage," she supplemented.

He nodded. "They offer, in short, incubation for ideas questionably
modern."

Her voice took on a fiery quality of enthusiasm.

"Life was never so gloriously fluid--so luminous--before. Breadth and
humanity are being fought for. Men and women are facing things
open-eyed, making splendid successes and splendid failures." After a
moment's pause she added, wearily, "My father calls them fads."

"And you want to have a part in all that. You don't want only the
culture of reading the _Atlantic Monthly_ at a village fireside?"

"I want to play my little part in the game of things. The idea of being
shielded from every danger and barred off from every effort, sickens me.
If I am to lead a life I can be proud of, it must be because I've come
out of the fight unshamed, not just because no one ever let me go into a
fight."

She was standing in an attitude of tense, even rapt earnestness, her
chin high and her hands clenched. Her voice held the vibrance of a
dreamer and her eyes were looking toward the horizon as if they were
seeing visions off across the moonlit water.

"I might fail miserably, of course, but I should know that I'd had my
chance. The idea at home seems to be that a woman's goodness depends on
someone else keeping it for her: that she should stick her head into the
sa