ch here and there she could set things straight which had been
crooked these sixty years. Perhaps, indeed, she no longer knew what the
truth was.

"If they'd lived now," she concluded, "I feel it wouldn't have happened.
People aren't so set upon tragedy as they were then. If my father had
been able to go round the world, or if she'd had a rest cure, everything
would have come right. But what could I do? And then they had bad
friends, both of them, who made mischief. Ah, Katharine, when you marry,
be quite, quite sure that you love your husband!"

The tears stood in Mrs. Hilbery's eyes.

While comforting her, Katharine thought to herself, "Now this is what
Mary Datchet and Mr. Denham don't understand. This is the sort of
position I'm always getting into. How simple it must be to live as they
do!" for all the evening she had been comparing her home and her father
and mother with the Suffrage office and the people there.

"But, Katharine," Mrs. Hilbery continued, with one of her sudden changes
of mood, "though, Heaven knows, I don't want to see you married,
surely if ever a man loved a woman, William loves you. And it's a nice,
rich-sounding name too--Katharine Rodney, which, unfortunately, doesn't
mean that he's got any money, because he hasn't."

The alteration of her name annoyed Katharine, and she observed, rather
sharply, that she didn't want to marry any one.

"It's very dull that you can only marry one husband, certainly," Mrs.
Hilbery reflected. "I always wish that you could marry everybody who
wants to marry you. Perhaps they'll come to that in time, but meanwhile
I confess that dear William--" But here Mr. Hilbery came in, and the
more solid part of the evening began. This consisted in the reading
aloud by Katharine from some prose work or other, while her mother
knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and her
father read the newspaper, not so attentively but that he could comment
humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine.
The Hilberys subscribed to a library, which delivered books on Tuesdays
and Fridays, and Katharine did her best to interest her parents in the
works of living and highly respectable authors; but Mrs. Hilbery was
perturbed by the very look of the light, gold-wreathed volumes, and
would make little faces as if she tasted something bitter as the reading
went on; while Mr. Hilbery would treat the moderns with a curious
elaborate banter such as o