ashamed, and for one long depressing year fell in love with nobody, became very shy, and hated herself.  It was during this year that she had her first, last, and only touch of mania.  It lasted only a little while and was not acute.  She got the idea that she was being watched, spied on, and followed.  But she was too strong in body and mind to give in for long to so silly an hallucination.  And when she had dismissed the second man and her maid, who had particularly excited her suspicions, the mania left her, as a dream leaves at waking.

In her seventeenth year she was presented to society, and became an immense favorite.  There were excellent reasons for this:  she was lovely to look at, she would inherit a great deal of money, she had charming natural manners, and she was sweet-tempered.

During her second season she had an unpleasant experience.  She had almost reached an understanding with a certain young man with whom she fancied herself in love.  They were spending a Saturday to Monday at a great place on Long Island.  On Sunday night, her host, a man old enough to be her father, invited her to see his rose garden by moonlight.  She accepted this invitation as a matter of course.  Pacing down a path between tall privet hedges, her host, who for some minutes seemed to have lost the use of his tongue, made her a sudden impassioned declaration of love, seized her in his arms, and kissed her wherever he could with a kind of dreadful fury.  For half a minute she stood still as a statue.  Then, crimson with shame and anger, she wrenched free, and struck him heavy blows on the face and head with her strong young fists.  She beat him, not indeed to insensibility, but to his senses.  They returned to the house after a time, and entered the drawing-room talking in lazy, natural voices and praising the beauty of the night and of the garden.  Not even Barbara’s lover suspected that anything out of the common had happened.

Barbara, having played half a dozen rubbers of bridge with the great skill and sweet temper which were natural to her, excused herself, went to her room, and cried half the night.  It was not the shame of having been forcibly kissed that sickened her of herself, but the unforgettable, unforgivable fact that toward the last of that furious kissing she had found a certain low feline pleasure in the kisses.  She wished that she might die, or, infinitely better, that she had never been born.

It seemed terrible to her that she could at once be in love with one man and enjoy the kisses of another.  She had heard of girls who were thus, and had for them the contempt which they deserved.  And yet it seemed that she was one of them; neither better nor worse.  What Barbara did not realize was, that in the first place she was not really in love with anybody and never had been, and that it was not she herself who enjoyed being kissed by a man to whom she was indifferent, neither liking nor loathing, but nature, which for reasons, or perhaps only whims, of its own, tempts the cell to divide and the flower to go to seed.