She had traveled more or less with her mother and Penelope ever since her father’s death, and was well used to taking the helm.  Experience and the responsibilities had made her self-reliant, and her jesting boast that she was a dependable young woman was the simple truth.  Yet to the most modern of girl bachelors there may come moments when the soul harks back to the eternal-womanly, and the desire to be petted and looked after and safe-conducted is stronger than the bachelor conventions.

Two sections away the inevitable newly married pair posed unconsciously to point the moral for Miss Brentwood.  She marked the eagerly anticipative solicitude of the boyish groom, contrasting it now and then with Ormsby’s less obtrusive attentions.  It was all very absurd and sentimental, she thought; and yet she was not without a curious heart-stirring of envy provoked by the self-satisfied complacency of the bride.

What had that chit of a girl done to earn her immunity from self-defendings and the petty anxieties?  Nothing, Elinor decided; at least, nothing more purposeful than the swimmer does when he lets himself drift with the current.  None the less, the immunity was hers, undeniably, palpably.  For the first time in her life Miss Brentwood found herself looking, with a little shudder of withdrawal and dismay, down the possible vista—­possible to every unmarried woman of twenty-four—­milestoned by unbroken years of spinsterhood and self-helpings.

Was she strong enough to walk this hedged-up path alone?—­single-hearted enough to go on holding out against her mother’s urgings, against Ormsby’s masterful wooing, against her own unconquerable longing for a sure anchorage in some safe haven of manful care and supervision; all this that she might continue to preserve her independence and live the life which, despite its drawbacks, was yet her own?

There were times when she doubted her resolution; and this first night of the westward journey was one of them.  She had thought at one time that she might be able to idealize David Kent, but he had gone his way to hew out his fortune, taking her upstirrings of his ambition in a purely literal and selfish sense, so far as she could determine.  And now there was Brookes Ormsby.  She could by no possibility idealize him.  He was a fixed fact, stubbornly asserted.  Yet he was a great-hearted gentleman, unspoiled by his millions, thoughtful always for her comfort, generous, self-effacing.  Just now, for example, when he had done all, he had seemed to divine her wish to be alone and had betaken himself to the smoking-compartment.

“I promised not to bore you,” he had said, “and I sha’n’t.  Send the porter after me if there is anything I have forgotten to do.”

She took up the magazine he had left on the seat beside her and sought to put away the disquieting thoughts.  But they refused to be dismissed; and now among them rose up another, dating back to that idealizing summer at the foot of Old Croydon, and having its genesis in a hard saying of her mother’s.