She pulled herself up short.  Wallowing again!  No more of that.  She’d leave March alone, and on that resolution she’d stop thinking about him.  She’d think about Rush and Graham and the farm.

Graham!  They didn’t come, Rush had said, any whiter than that.  Probably he was right about it.  It was a wonderful quality, that sort of whiteness.  What was it he had done (she didn’t even remember!) that had caused him such bitter self-reproach?  You couldn’t help liking him.  It ought not to be hard to fall sufficiently in love with him.  And out on a farm...  A farmer’s wife certainly had enough to do to keep her from growing restless.  With a lot of children, four to half a dozen,—­no one could call that a worthless life.

And it was practicable.  With an even break in the luck, she could accomplish the whole of it.  A man like Graham she could make happy.  Her one gift would be enough for him; all he’d want.  What was it he had told Rush to-night?  That he had always thought her the most perfect...

At that, appallingly, she was seized in the cold grip of an unforeseen realization.  She couldn’t marry a boy like that—­she couldn’t marry any man who regarded her like that—­without first telling him what she was; what she was not!  She would have to make clear to him—­there was simply no escape from that—­the nature of the thing that had happened in that tiny flat in New York where she had lived alone so long.

It was possible, of course, oh, more than that, probable even, that after hearing the story he would still want to marry her.  That he might regard her, no matter what she said, as having been wronged; her innocence, though once taken advantage of by a scoundrel, intact.  His love would be reenforced by pity.  He’d think of nothing, in the stress of that moment, but the desire to protect her, to provide a fortress for her.

But would she dare, on these terms, marry him, or any other man for that matter, no matter how ardently he professed forgiveness?  It wouldn’t be until after the marriage was an accomplished thing, its first desires satisfied, its first tension relaxed, that the story of her adventure would begin to loom black and thunderous over the horizon of his mind.  (Who was the man?  How could it have happened?  In what mood of madness could she have done such a thing?  Might it ever,—­when might it not—­happen again?) No!  Marriage was difficult enough without being handicapped additionally by a perennial misgiving like that.  No thoroughfare again!

She started once more around the circle, but one can not keep at that sort of thing forever.  About sunrise she fell asleep.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DUMB PRINCESS

None of his own family knew quite what to make of Anthony March.  All of them but his mother disapproved of him, on more or less mutually contradictory grounds.  Disapproved of him more than they did of one another, though he occupied a sort of middle ground between them.  It is a possible explanation to the paradox that each of them regarded him as a potential ally and so spent more time trying to change his ways, scolding at him, pointing out his derelictions and lost opportunities, than it was worth while spending on the others who were hopeless.