upset there's not a ghost of a chance of my
being able to save you."

Milly was a poor swimmer, too, and felt by no means competent to save
herself; neither was she anxious to be drowned. So she sat down again.

"Put me out at the ferry, please," she repeated, haughtily.

They were reaching the end of the willow avenue, just where the wire
rope crosses the river. On the right was a small wooden landing-stage,
and high above it the green, steep river-bank, with the gray house and
the arbors on the top. The old Frenchman stood before the house in his
shirt-sleeves, watching sadly for his accustomed prey, which for some
inexplicable reason did not come. He took off his cap expectantly to
Maxwell Davison, whom he knew; but the canoe glided swiftly under the
rope and on.

"No, I sha'n't put you out, Mildred," Maxwell answered with decision,
after a pause. "I'm sorry if I've offended you. I've forgotten my
manners, no doubt, and must seem a bit of a brute to you. I didn't bring
you here just to quarrel, or to play a practical joke upon you, and send
you on a field-walk in that smart frock and shoes--" he smiled at her,
and this time she was obliged to feel a certain fascination in his
smile--"nor yet to go on with the game you've been playing with me all
these months. You forget; I've been used to Nature for so many years
that I find it hard to realize how natural the most artificial
conditions of life appear to you. I'll try to remember; but you must
remember, too, that the most civilized beings on earth have got to come
right up against the hard facts of Nature sometimes. They've got to be
stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to
recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of
Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core.
And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined,
but simply stupid and obstinate and no good."

Milly, if she would have no compromise with principles, was always quick
to accept an apology. She did not follow the line of Maxwell's argument,
but she remembered it was noted in a certain deplorably irregular Diary,
that he had lived for many years in the East and was quite Orientalized
in many of his ways and ideas. With gentle dignity she signified that in
her opinion civilized European manners and views were to be commended in
opposition to barbarous and Oriental ones. Maxwell, his face bent
towar