on as
to the qualifications of women to play the part of men in love, even if
permitted by society.

It had been hard enough to nerve herself to the point of doing what she
had done in view of the embarrassments she had foreseen. An hour after
she uttered those fatal words, her whole thinking was summed up in the
cry, "If I only had not done it, then at least he would still respect
me." In the morning she looked like one in a fever. Her eyes were red
and swollen, her face was pallid but for a hard red spot in each
cheek, and her whole appearance was expressive of bodily and mental
prostration. She did not go down to breakfast, pleading a very genuine
headache, and Arthur's note and the book on pottery were brought up to
her. She guessed his motive in a moment. Her need gave her the due to
his meaning.

What was on Arthur's part merely a decent sort of thing to do, her
passionate gratitude instantly magnified into an act of chivalrous
generosity, proving him the noblest of men and the gentlest of
gentlemen. She exaggerated the abjectness of the position from which his
action had rescued her, in order to feel that she owed the more to his
nobility. At any time during the previous night she gladly would have
given ten years of her life to recall the confession that she had made
to him; now she told herself, with a burst of exultant tears, that she
would not recall it if she could. She had made no mistake. Her womanly
dignity was safe in his keeping. Whether he ever returned her love or
not, she was not ashamed, but was glad, and always should be glad, that
he knew she loved him.

As for Arthur, the reverence with which he bent over her hand on leaving
her was as heartfelt as it was graceful. In her very disregard of
conventional decorum she had impressed him the more strikingly with the
native delicacy and refinement of her character. It had been reserved
for her to show him how genuine a thing is womanly modesty, and how far
from being dependent on those conventional affectations with which it
is in the vulgar mind so often identified, with the effect of seeming as
artificial as they.

When, a few evenings later, he went to Miss Oswald's party, the leading
idea in his mind was that he should meet Maud there. His eyes sought
her out the moment he entered the Oswald parlors, but it was some time
before he approached her. For years he had been constantly meeting her,
but he had never before taken special note of her app