ll her the secret of her fascination. If he had told her, she would
no doubt have tried to train and to use it--and so would inevitably
have lost it.

To go on with that important conference in the sitting-room in the
handsome, roomy house of the Gowers at Hanging Rock, Frank Gower
eagerly seized upon his wife's subtly nasty remark. "I don't see why
in thunder you haven't married, Milly," said he. "You've had every
chance, these last four or five years."

"And it'll be harder now," moaned her mother. "For it looks as though
we were going to be wretchedly poor. And poverty is so repulsive."

"Do you think," said Mildred, "that giving me the idea that I must
marry right away will make it easier for me to marry? Everyone who
knows us knows our circumstances." She looked significantly at Frank's
wife, who had been wailing through Hanging Rock the woeful plight of
her dead father-in-law's family. The young Mrs. Gower blushed and
glanced away. "And," Mildred went on, "everyone is saying that I must
marry at once--that there's nothing else for me to do." She smiled
bitterly. "When I go into the street again I shall see nothing but
flying men. And no man would come to call unless he brought a chaperon
and a witness with him."

"How can you be so frivolous?" reproached her mother.

Mildred was used to being misunderstood by her mother, who had long
since been made hopelessly dull by the suffocating life she led and by
pain from her feet, which never left her at ease for a moment except
when she had them soaking in cold water. Mrs. Gower had been born with
ordinary feet, neither ugly nor pretty and entirely fit for the uses
for which nature intended feet. She had spoiled them by wearing shoes
to make them look smaller and slimmer than they were. In steady weather
she was plaintive; in changeable weather she varied between irritable
and violent.

Said Mildred to her brother: "How much--JUST how much is there?"

"I can't say exactly," replied her brother, who had not yet solved to
his satisfaction the moral problem of how much of the estate he ought
to allow his mother and sister and how much he ought to claim for
himself--in such a way that the claim could not be disputed.

Mildred looked fixedly at him. He showed his uneasiness not by
glancing away, but by the appearance of a certain hard defiance in his
eyes. Said she:

"What is the very most we can hope for?"

A silence. Her mother broke it. "Mildred