home and have one talk with Mara
without witnesses."

CHAPTER XXXII

THE BETROTHAL

Moses walked slowly home from his interview with Sally, in a sort of
maze of confused thought. In general, men understand women only from the
outside, and judge them with about as much real comprehension as an
eagle might judge a canary-bird. The difficulty of real understanding
intensifies in proportion as the man is distinctively manly, and the
woman womanly. There are men with a large infusion of the feminine
element in their composition who read the female nature with more
understanding than commonly falls to the lot of men; but in general,
when a man passes beyond the mere outside artifices and unrealities
which lie between the two sexes, and really touches his finger to any
vital chord in the heart of a fair neighbor, he is astonished at the
quality of the vibration.

"I could not have dreamed there was so much in her," thought Moses, as
he turned away from Sally Kittridge. He felt humbled as well as
astonished by the moral lecture which this frisky elf with whom he had
all summer been amusing himself, preached to him from the depths of a
real woman's heart. What she said of Mara's loving him filled his eyes
with remorseful tears,--and for the moment he asked himself whether this
restless, jealous, exacting desire which he felt to appropriate her
whole life and heart to himself were as really worthy of the name of
love as the generous self-devotion with which she had, all her life,
made all his interests her own.

Was he to go to her now and tell her that he loved her, and therefore
he had teased and vexed her,--therefore he had seemed to prefer another
before her,--therefore he had practiced and experimented upon her
nature? A suspicion rather stole upon him that love which expresses
itself principally in making exactions and giving pain is not exactly
worthy of the name. And yet he had been secretly angry with her all
summer for being the very reverse of this; for her apparent cheerful
willingness to see him happy with another; for the absence of all signs
of jealousy,--all desire of exclusive appropriation. It showed, he said
to himself, that there was no love; and now when it dawned on him that
this might be the very heroism of self-devotion, he asked himself which
was best worthy to be called love.

"She did love him, then!" The thought blazed up through the smouldering
embers of thought in his heart like a ton