Mrs. Heth having allowed the silence to continue a moment,
educationally, drew a handkerchief across her upper lip, with its
strange little downy mustache, and resumed:

"With no plans of your own, you have lately thrown away the best
opportunity you will ever have in your life. Now there are only two
theories on which I can explain this conduct--so totally unlike your
usual good sense. One is that you have permitted yourself, without my
knowledge, to become interested in somebody else.... Have you?"

"No--oh, no!... No, of course not."

"That I felt confident of," said mamma, though not without a certain
note of relief. "Confident.... Yet--to touch the second point,--as you
look toward the future, you do expect to marry some day, do you not?"

The daughter seemed restive under this cross-examination. She turned
away from the maternal scrutiny, and, resting her arm upon her
chair-back, looked toward the shaded window.

"Yes--I suppose so.... That seems to be all I'm fit for.... But--since
you ask me, mamma--I _would_ like, in the meantime, not to be so ... so
plainly labelled _waiting_.... I'd like," she said, hesitatingly, "to
have _one_ man I meet--see me in some other light than as a candidate
for matrimony."

"That," said Mrs. Heth, firmly, "will never be, so long as you retain
your youth and beauty, and men retain their nature....

"And why should you wish it otherwise?" continued the dominant little
lady. "Despite all the loose, unwomanly talk in the air, you do realize,
I see, that marriage will always remain the noblest possible career
for a woman."

Cally remembered a converse of this proposition she had heard one day at
the Woman's Club. She answered with light bitterness:

"When I said just now that I was fit for marriage, I meant marriage,
mamma--a wedding. Of course, I'm not fit to be anybody's wife...." She
paused, and added in a voice from which the bitterness had all gone out:
"I'm not fit to be anybody's mother."

"There, there!" riposted mamma, briskly. "I think that's enough of poor
Henrietta Cooney, and her wild, unsuccessful notions."

There was another brief silence; the silence of the death of talk.

"You're in a dangerously unsettled state of mind, my
daughter--dangerously. But you will find, as other women have found,
that marriage will relieve all these discontents. I myself," said mamma,
with a considerable stretching of the truth, "went through the same
stages in my youth--thoug