good many times, 'This is a nasty
situation, but it's my quarrel.' And this is mine."

She felt her loneliness. At once it seemed that she had not yet known
the real man. Their play at friendship, sympathy,--what was it?--had
been only play. Like all men, he could bring the woman a flower, a crown
even, "a rosy wreath," but the roses must wither while he chose his
sword. She could not speak.

"What is it, playmate?" he asked presently. It was the old kindly voice.

"I must go back. I'm cold."

"Cold! It's warm to-night."

"Good-night."

He followed her.

"I did it. I chilled you somehow. Forgive me."

She could not speak, and he was at her side.

"I know. There are things that can't be talked about. They sound like
twaddle. These things I've told you--they're well enough to think about.
They can't be said. You're disappointed in me!"

But it was not that he had told her too much; he had told her too
little. He had put her away from him.

"Good-night," she said again. "It's all right, playmate, truly."

His anxious voice came after her.

"It's not all right. I've muddled it."

XVI

Electra felt very much alone in a world of wrongdoers. To her mind moral
trespassing was a definite state of action fully recognized by the
persons concerned in it. She made no doubt that everybody was as well
able to classify obliquity as she was to do it for them. She had stated
times for sitting down and debating upon her own past deeds, though she
seldom found any flagrant fault in them. There was now and then an
inability to reach her highest standard; but she saw no crude
derelictions such as other people fell into. It was almost impossible
for her to think about grandmother at all, the old lady seemed to her so
naughty and so mad. Billy Stark, too, though he was a man of the world,
admirably equipped, was guilty of extreme bad taste or he could never
have asked Madam Fulton to marry him. Why was he calling her Florrie and
giving her foolish nosegays every morning? Rose and Peter, when it came
to them, seemed pledged to keeping up some wild fiction beneficial to
Rose; only Markham MacLeod was entirely right, and so powerful, too,
that his return must shake all the warring atoms into a harmonious
conformity with Electra and the moral law.

Moreover, she had the entire programme of the club meeting to
reconstruct. Nothing, she inexorably knew, would tempt her to allow for
a moment any further consideration of