judge. I dare say
they could, though with their son John going before long to hang out his
shingle, as they call it, I doubt if it could be without bleeding
themselves. But they are not convinced that the sacrifice ought to be
made." He frowned at the pattern on the rug, and suddenly cut at it
impatiently with his stick. "It is a singular story, in which everybody
is right and the result wrong, horribly wrong!"

"Oh, dear me!" sighed Mrs. Hawthorne, feeling with him even before
understanding.

"I ought perhaps to say," he corrected, "everybody is good and
well-meaning, but has been unwise. And everybody now has to pay."

"I've thought right along that the Fosses had some reason for not being
very happy," said Mrs. Hawthorne, "and I guessed it was something about
Brenda. But they never said anything, and I didn't try to make out.
Brenda doesn't take to me, somehow, as the others do. I'm not her kind,
of course; but I do adore her from afar. She's so beautiful! She's like
a person in a story-book, who at the end dies, looking at the sunset
over the sea, or else marries the prince."

"Yes, Brenda is wonderful."

"I never should take her for an American."

"She's not like one, and yet she is. She has grown up in this country
and breathed in its ideas and feelings till she even looks Italian. Her
parents are the sort of Americans that fifty years of foreign countries
wouldn't budge; but they began later. Still, it is because Brenda is
American, after all, that cruelties are being committed. Her family have
taken it for granted that one of them couldn't really be in love with an
Italian, least of all that joke, a dapper and decorative Italian officer
that a girl buys at a fixed price for her husband. And Brenda can't say
to them: 'But I am. I am in love with just such a man. The happiness of
my life depends upon your finding the vulgar sum of money with which to
buy him for me.' Because of the American-ness all round, Brenda can't
say that to them, and because she doesn't say it, they are in doubt,
they only half apprehend, they don't understand. The one thing they are
sure of is that to marry a foreigner is a mistake. And the one safe
thing they see to do, when Brenda's face, combined with her entire
reserve toward them, has begun to torment them seriously, is to send her
away where, if the truth be that she mysteriously is 'interested in' an
Italian, the change of scene may help to put him out of her head."

"So th