e world ain't made of honeycomb, you know, and there's no use
pretending it is. But you're a darn good sport, Patty. You're as good a
sport as I ever struck up with in this little affair of life."

CHAPTER XVIII

MYSTIFICATION

Walking slowly home across the Square, Patty told herself that the
future had been taken out of her hands. She seemed to have been moved
mentally, if not bodily, into another world, into a world where the
sleepy old Square, wrapped in a soft afternoon haze, still existed, but
from which Stephen Culpeper had vanished in a rosy cloud. She did not
know why she had relinquished the thought of Stephen since her visit to
the house in East Leigh Street; but some deep instinct warned her that
she had widened the gulf between them by her excursion with Gershom. "I
can't help it," she thought sensibly enough. "There wasn't anything in
it before that, and I might as well go ahead and stop thinking about
it." Her anger at Stephen's neglect had melted into a vague and
impersonal resentment, a resentment, rather for the dying woman than for
herself, against all the needless cruelties of life. Even Gershom, even
the unspeakable Gershom, had had discernment enough to see that
something good in that poor woman had been blighted and crushed. Was it
true that no one was ever given the chance to be one's best? Was this
true, not only of that dying woman, but of her father and Stephen and
Corinna and herself and all human beings everywhere?

Lingering a moment near the Washington monument, she stood watching the
straggling groups that were crossing the Square. Bit by bit, snatches
of conversation drifted into her mind and then blew out again, leaving
scarcely the shadow of an impression. "They tell me it's going up. I
don't know, but I'll find out to-morrow." "I wouldn't wear one of those
things for a million dollars, and he says--" "Yes, I've arranged to go
unless the strike should be called next week."

The strike? Oh, she had almost forgotten it! She had almost forgotten
the message she had promised to deliver to her father. With a gesture
that appeared to sweep her last remaining illusion behind her, she
started resolutely up the drive to the house. After all, whatever came,
she would not let them think that she was either afraid of life or
disappointed in love. She would not mope, and she would not show the
white feather. On one point she was passionately determined--no man, by
any method known to t