r intelligence, you know."

"I've been thinking about the thing," Mildred retorted, looking over her
mother's shoulder into the summer night. "What's the use?"

"What's the use!" Mrs. Brace echoed, incredulous.

"Just that."

"We've been all over it! You know what it means to you--to both of us."

They spoke in low tones, careful that the man in the living room should
not hear.

"My dear mother," Mildred said, with a return of her cool insolence,
"you display a confidence hardly warranted by your--and
our--man-experience."

She yawned slightly.

There was a harsher note in her mother's reply.

"He can't refuse. He can't!"

Mildred stared at the grey envelope a full three minutes. Mrs. Brace,
wordless, showing no uneasiness as to the outcome, waited for her to
speak.

"It's no use, mother," she said at last. "We can't manage it--him--this
thing. It's too late."

The flat finality, the dreariness, of that announcement angered the
older woman. Calmness fell from her. She came away from the window
slowly, her hands clasped tightly at her back, the upper part of her
body bending forward a little, her thin nostrils expanding and
contracting to the force of her hurried breathing like leaves shaken in
the wind. The curl of her thin lips added a curious ferocity to the
words that passed them. She spoke, only when her face was within a few
inches of Mildred's.

"No use!" she said contemptuously, her lowered voice explosive with
passion. "Why? And why too late? Have you no self-respect, no will, no
firmness? Are you all jelly and----"

She got hold of herself with remarkable effectiveness, throwing off the
signs of her wrath as suddenly as they had appeared. She retreated a
step and laughed, without mirth.

"Oh, well," she said, "it's your party, not mine, after all. But, in
future, my dear, don't waste your time and mine in school-girl heroics."

She completed her retreat and stood again at the window. Her
self-restraint was, in a way, fiercer than her rage--and it affected her
daughter.

"You see," she concluded, "why I didn't mail it. I knew you wouldn't do
the very thing you'd outlined."

Mildred looked at the envelope again. The pause that followed was broken
by the man in the other room.

"Mildred," he called.

Mrs. Brace laughed silently. Mildred, seeing that ridicule, recoiled.

"What are you laughing at?" she demanded.

Her mother pointed to the communicating door.

"I was thinking of _that