brought. "At
least," she thought to herself, "it's heroic!" Yet before she could find
a moment's comfort in the reflection it was gone, and she started up and
moved on again, knowing that, whatever it may be for man, for true
womanhood the better heroism is not to give a passionate love its unwise
way at heroic cost, but dispassionately to master love in all its
greatness and help it grow to passion in wise ways.

"If I take this step," she began to say to herself audibly as she
followed the old road out into a neglected meadow, "I satisfy my father;
I delight my friends; I rid myself at once and forever of this dreadful
dependence on him." She bit her lip and shut her eyes against these
politic considerations. "He tells me to weigh the matter well. How shall
I, when there's nothing to weigh against it? Fannie could choose between
the one who loved her and the one she loved. I have no choice; this is
the most--most likely it is all--that will ever be offered me. There's
just the one simple sane question before me--Shill I or shall I?" She
smiled. "We make too much of it all!" she thought on. "A man's life
depends upon the man he is, not on the girl he gets; why shouldn't it be
so with us?" She smiled still more, and, glancing round the open view,
murmured, "Silly little country girls! We begin life as a poem, we can't
find our rhyme, we tell our mothers--if we have any--they say yes, it
was the same with our aunts; so we decide with them that good prose will
do very well; they kiss us--that means they won't tell--and--O Heaven!
is that our best?" She dropped upon a bank and wept till she shook.

But that would never do! She dried her tears and lay toying with her
book and sadly putting into thought a thing she had never more than felt
before: that whatever she might wisely or unwisely do with it, she held
in her nature a sacred gift of passion; that life, her life, could never
bloom in full joy and glory shut out from wifehood and motherhood, and
that the idlest self-deceit she could attempt would be to say she need
not marry. Suddenly she started and then lay stiller than before. She
had found the long-sought explanation of her mother's tardy
marriage--neither a controlling nor a controlled passion, but the
reasoning despair of famishing affections. Barbara let her face sink
into the grass and wept again for the dear lost one with a new reverence
and compassion. She was pressing her brow hard against the earth when
th