bit is nothing to the letter habit-between
lovers. Not that Margaret expected a letter. Indeed, reason told her
that it had not gone so far as that. But she should see him. She felt
sure of that. And the thought filled all the vacant places in her
imagination of the future.

And yet she thought she was seeing him more clearly than when he was
with her. Oh wise young woman! She fancied she was deliberating, looking
at life with great prudence. It must be one's own fault if one makes a
radical mistake in marriage. She was watching the married people about
her with more interest-the Morgans, our own household, Mrs. Fletcher;
and besides, her aunt, whose even and cheerful life lacked this
experience. It is so wise to do this, to keep one's feelings in control,
not to be too hasty! Everybody has these intervals of prudence. That is
the reason there are so few mistakes.

I dare say that all these reflections and deliberations in the maidenly
mind were almost unconscious to herself; certainly unacknowledged. It
was her imagination that she was following, and scarcely a distinct
reality or intention. She thought of Henderson, and he gave a certain
personality, vivid maybe, to that dream of the future which we all
in youth indulge; but she would have shrunk from owning this even to
herself. We deceive ourselves as often as we deceive others. Margaret
would have repudiated with some warmth any intimation that she had lost
her heart, and was really predicting the practical possibilities of that
loss, and she would have been quite honest with herself in thinking that
she was still mistress of her own feeling. Later on she would know, and
delight to confess, that her destiny was fixed at a certain hour, at
a certain moment, in New York, for subsequent events would run back to
that like links in a chain. And she would have been right and also wrong
in that; for but for those subsequent events the first impression would
have faded, and been taken little account of in her life. I am more and
more convinced that men and women act more upon impulse and less upon
deep reflection and self-examination than the analytic novelists would
have us believe, duly weighing motives and balancing considerations;
and that men and women know themselves much less thoroughly than they
suppose they do. There is a great deal of exaggeration, I am convinced,
about the inward struggles and self-conflicts. The reader may know that
Margaret was hopelessly in