an
to shake so with disrespectful laughter that I felt that my dignity was
about to demand that I withdraw coldly from his arms, where I had just
got so warm and comfortable and at home; but with the first slight
intimation of my intention, which was conveyed by a very feeble indeed
loosening of my arms from around his Henry Clay collar, he held me
firmly against him and controlled his unseemly mirth, only I could still
feel it convulsing his left lung,--though as I had no business being
near enough to notice it, I felt it only fair not to.

"Please don't worry about those other Five dear women," he begged, in
the nicest and most considerate voice possible so that I tightened my
arms again as I listened. "If Miss Mathers doesn't feel justified in
giving up the dowries by your--your failure to prove the proposition, we
can just invite them all down here and in Glendale and Bolivar and
Hillsboro and Providence, to say nothing of the countryside, we can
plant them all cozily. I can delicately explain to their choices exactly
how to let them manage circumstances like--" he illustrated his scheme
just here until it took time for me to get breath to listen to the rest
of his apology--"this and there is no telling, with such a start as the
cult has got in the Harpeth Valley already, how far ft will spread.
Please forgive me, dear!"

"Yes," I answered doubtfully. Then I raised my head and looked him full
in the face as I made my declaration calmly but with the perfect
conviction that I still have and always will have, world without end.
"Yes, but don't you think for one minute I don't _know_ that what Jane
and I and all the most advanced women in the world are trying for is the
right and just and the only way for men and women to come logically into
the kind of heritage you and I have stumbled into. Absolute freedom and
equality between all human beings is going to be the price of Kingdom
Come. I shall always be humiliated that I got scared out in the
graveyard and didn't do it to you. It is going to be the regret of my
life."

"Truly, I'm sorry, sweetheart," he answered most contritely. "If I were
to take my hat and go back to the gate and come in again properly and
let you do it, would that make you feel any better?"

"No, it wouldn't," I answered quickly because why should I be separated
from him all the two and a half minutes it would take to play out that
farce, when I have been separated from him all the twenty-five y