ignorance and
impotence, she strained her eyes into the white, dimly translucent bank,
from which stray drops repeatedly lashed her face, as though its
vaporous wall alone stood between her and the knowledge of her future.

* * * * *

If she could have seen beyond the fog and carried her vision over the
intervening leagues of ocean, so as to look into a large, old-fashioned
New York house in Gramercy Park, she would have found Derek Pruyn and
Lucilla van Tromp discussing one of the cardinal points on which that
future was to turn.

That it was not an amusing conversation would have been clear from the
agitation of Derek's manner as he strode up and down the room, as well
as from the rigidity with which his cousin, usually a limp person, held
herself erect, in the attitude of a woman who has no intention of
retiring from the stand she has taken.

"You force me to speak more plainly than I like, Derek," she was saying,
"because you make yourself so obtuse. You seem to forget that years have
a way of passing, and that Dorothea is no longer a very little girl."

"She's barely seventeen--no more than a child."

"But a motherless child, and one who has been allowed a great deal of
liberty."

"Is there any reason why a girl shouldn't be a free creature?"

"Only the reason why a boy shouldn't be one."

"That's different. A boy would be getting into mischief."

"Even a girl isn't proof against that possibility. It mayn't be a boy's
kind of mischief, but it's a kind of her own."

Unwilling to credit this statement, and yet unable to contradict it,
Pruyn continued his march for a minute or two in silence, while Miss
Lucilla waited nervously for him to speak again. It was one of the few
points in the round of daily existence on which she was prepared to give
him battle. It was part of the ridiculous irony of life that Derek, with
the domestic incompetency natural to a banker and a club-man, should
have a daughter to train, while she whose instinct was so passionately
maternal must be doomed to spinsterhood. She had never made any secret
of the fact that to watch Derek bringing up Dorothea made her as fidgety
as if she had seen him trimming hats, though she recognized the futility
of trying to snatch the task from his hands in order to do it properly.
The utmost she had been able to accomplish was to be allowed to plod
daily from Gramercy Park to Fifth Avenue, in the hope of keeping bad
f