have allowed my life to grow like hers."

"No," said Hadria, laughing, "you would probably have run away or killed
yourself or somebody, long before this."

Miss Du Prel could not honestly deny this possibility. After a pause she
said:

"A woman cannot afford to despise the dictates of Nature. She may escape
certain troubles in that way; but Nature is not to be cheated, she makes
her victim pay her debt in another fashion. There is no escape. The
centuries are behind one, with all their weight of heredity and habit;
the order of society adds its pressure--one's own emotional needs. Ah,
no! it does not answer to pit oneself against one's race, to bid
defiance to the fundamental laws of life."

"Such then are the alternatives," said Hadria, moving close to the
river's brink, and casting two big stones into the current. "There stand
the devil and the deep sea."

"You are too young to have come to that sad conclusion," said Miss Du
Prel.

"But I haven't," cried Hadria. "I still believe in revolt."

The other shook her head.

"And what about love? Are you going through life without the one thing
that makes it bearable?"

"I would not purchase it at such a cost. If I can't have it without
despoiling myself of everything that is worth possessing, I prefer to go
without."

"You don't know what you say!" exclaimed Miss Du Prel.

"But why? Love would be ruined and desecrated. I understand by it a
sympathy so perfect, and a reverence so complete, that the conditions of
ordinary domestic existence would be impossible, unthinkable, in
connection with it."

"So do I understand love. But it comes, perhaps, once in a century, and
if one is too fastidious, it passes by and leaves one forlorn; at best,
it comes only to open the gates of Paradise, for a moment, and to close
them again, and leave one in outer darkness."

"Always?"

"I believe always," answered Miss Du Prel.

The running of the river sounded peacefully in the pause that followed.

"Well," cried Hadria at length, raising her head with a long sigh, "one
cannot do better than follow one's own instinct and thought of the
moment. Regret may come, do what one may. One cannot escape from one's
own temperament."

"One can modify it."

"I cannot even wish to modify mine, so that I should become amenable to
these social demands. I stand in hopeless opposition to the scheme of
life that I have grown up amongst, to the universal scheme of life
indeed, as unders