There was a long pause during which an extraordinary thing happened to Mathilde.  She found that it didn’t make the very slightest difference to her what her mother thought of Pete or his hands, that it would never make any difference to her again.  It was as if her will had suddenly been born, and the first act of that will was to decide to go with the man she loved.  How could she have doubted for an instant?  It was so simple, and no opposition would or could mean anything to her.  She was not in the least angry; on the contrary, she felt extremely pitiful, as if she were saying good-by to some one who did not know she was going away, as if in a sense she had now parted from her mother forever.  Tears came into her eyes.

“Ah, Mama!” she said like a sigh.

Mrs. Farron felt she had been cruel, but without regretting it; for that, she thought, was often a parent’s duty.

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Mathilde.  The boy is a nice enough little person, but really I could not let you set off for China at a minute’s notice with any broker’s clerk who happened to fall in love with your golden hair.  When you have a little more experience you will discriminate between the men you like to have love you and the men there is the smallest chance of your loving.  I assure you, if little Wayne were not in love with you, you would think him a perfectly commonplace boy.  If one of your friends were engaged to him, you would be the first to say that you wondered what it was she saw in him.  That isn’t the way one wants people to feel about one’s husband, is it?  And as to going to China with him, you know that’s impossible, don’t you?”

“It would be impossible to let him go without me.”

“Really, Mathilde!” said Mrs. Farron, gently, as if she, so willing to play fair, were being put off with fantasies.  “I don’t understand you,” she added.

“No, Mama; you don’t.”

The motor stopped at the door, and they went in silence to Mrs. Farron’s room, where for a bitter hour they talked, neither yielding an inch.  At last Adelaide sent the girl to bed.  Mathilde was aware of profound physical exhaustion, and yet underneath there was a high knowledge of something unbreakable within her.

Left alone, Adelaide turned instinctively toward her husband’s door.  There were her strength and vision.  Then she remembered, and drew back; but presently, hearing a stir there, she knocked very softly.  A nurse appeared on the instant.

“Oh, please, Mrs. Farron!  Mr. Farron has just got to sleep.”

Adelaide stood alone in the middle of the floor.  Once again, she thought, in a crisis of her life she had no one to depend on but herself.  She lifted her shoulders.  No one was to blame, but there the fact was.  They urged you to cling and be guided, but when the pinch came, you had to act for yourself.  She had learned her lesson now.  Henceforward she took her own life over into her own hands.