em to me, and she'll only hear your voice, and she'll think
them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh
a thousand pounds. It doesn't matter to a woman what a man's saying or
doing, or whether he's so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that
under everything he's saying, 'I love you.' A man isn't that way, but a
woman is. Now go." Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.

"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" he said admiringly.

"Then be a father to me," she said teasingly.

"I can't marry both your mother and nurse."

"P'r'aps you can't marry either," she replied sarcastically, "and I know
that in any case you'll never be any relative of mine by marriage. Get
going," she said almost impatiently.

He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, "I'll let
you hear some of my verses one day when you're more developed and can
understand them."

"I'll bet they beat mine," he called back.

"You'll win your bet," she answered, and stood leaning against a tree
with a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes. When he had
disappeared, sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper,
unfolded it, and laid it on her knee. "It is better," she said. "It's
not good poetry, of course, but it's truer, and it's not done according
to a pattern like his. Yes, it's real, real, real, and he'll never see
it--never see it now, for I've fought it' all out, and I've won."

Then she slowly read the verses aloud:

"Yes, I've won," she said with determination. So many of her sex have
said things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their
decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never,
never, never do. Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a
new force awakened in her character.

For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the
little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house. She was
thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom
in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social
pale. Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world
beyond this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the
conscience of a man or woman was the only law. She was not lawless in
mind or spirit. She was only rebelling against a situation in which she
was bound hand and foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive
desire, if she wished to do so