w that high-sounding
titles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the mass
of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide's grand-aunt was part
of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering. But that other self of
hers, so reluctant to be laughed or frowned down and out by the self that
was Hiram Ranger's daughter, still forced her to share in the ancient,
ignorant allegiance to "appearances." She did not appreciate how bored
she was, how impatient to be back with Dory, the never monotonous, the
always interesting, until she discovered that Janet, with her usual
subtlety, had arranged for them to stay another week, had made it
impossible for her to refuse without seeming to be disobliging and even
downright rude. They were to have returned to Paris on a Monday. On
Sunday she wrote Dory to telegraph for her on Tuesday.

"I'd hate to be looking forward to that life of dull foolery," thought
she, as the mossy bastions of Besancon drifted from her horizon--she was
journeying up alone, Janet staying on with one of the Saint Berthe women
as chaperone. "It is foolery and it is dull. I don't see how grown-up
people endure it, unless they've never known any better. Yet I seem
unable to content myself with the life father stands for--and Dory." She
appreciated the meaning of the legend of the creature with the two
bodies and the two wills, each always opposed to the other, with the
result that all motion was in a dazing circle in which neither wished to
go. "Still," she concluded, "I _am_ learning"--which was the truth;
indeed, she was learning with astonishing rapidity for a girl who had had
such an insidiously wrong start and was getting but slight encouragement.

Dory, of course, was helping her, but not as he might. Instead of
bringing to bear that most powerful of influences, the influence of
passionate love, he held to his stupid compact with his supersensitive
self--the compact that he would never intrude his longings upon her. He
constantly reminded himself how often woman gives through a sense of duty
or through fear of alienating or wounding one she respects and likes;
and, so he saw in each impulse to enter Eden boldly a temptation to him
to trespass, a temptation to her to mask her real feelings and suffer it.
The mystery in which respectable womanhood is kept veiled from the male,
has bred in him an awe of the female that she does not fully realize or
altogether approve--though she is not sl