One day Mary suddenly said to her father, “Who was Paul?”

Fortunately for Josiah the light was on his back.

“Last night at the dance,” she continued, “I heard a woman saying that I didn’t look the least bit like Paul, and I wondered who he was.”

“Perhaps some one in her own family,” said Josiah at last.

“Must have been,” Mary carelessly nodded.  They went on chatting and presently Josiah was himself again.

“What are you going to do about Walter Cabot?” he asked, looking at her with love in his sombre eyes.

Mary made a helpless gesture.

“Has he asked you yet?”

“Yes,” she said in a muffled voice, “—­often.”

“Why don’t you take him?”

Again Mary made her helpless gesture and, for a long moment she too was on the point of opening her heart.  But again heredity, training and age-old tradition stood between them, finger on lip.

“I sometimes have such a feeling that I want to do something in the world,” she nearly told him.  “And if I married Wally, it would spoil it all.  I sometimes have such dreams—­such wonderful dreams of doing something—­of being somebody—­and I know that if I married Wally I should never be able to dream like that again—­”

As you can see, that isn’t the sort of a thing which a girl can very well say to her father—­or to any one else for that matter, except in fear and hesitation.

“The way I am now,” she nearly told him, “there are ever so many things in life that I can do—­ever so many doors that I can open.  But if I marry Wally, every door is locked but one.  I can be his wife; that’s all.”

Obviously again, you couldn’t expect a girl to speak like that, especially a girl with dreamy eyes and shy.  Nevertheless those were the thoughts which often came to her at night, after she had said her prayers and popped into bed and lay there in the dark turning things over in her mind.

One night, for instance, after Wally had left earlier than usual, she lay with her head snuggled on the pillow, full of vague dreams and visions—­vague dreams of greatness born of the sunsets and stars and flowers—­vague visions of proving herself worthy of the heritage of life.

“I don’t think it’s a bit fair,” she thought.  “As soon as a woman marries—­well, somehow, she’s through.  But it doesn’t seem to make any difference to the man.  He can go right on doing the big things—­the great things—­”

She stopped, arrested by the sound of a mandolin under her window.  The next moment the strains of Wally’s tenor entered the room, mingled with the moonlight and the scent of the syringa bush.  A murmuring, deep-toned trio accompanied him.

“Soft o’er the fountain
 Ling’ring falls the southern moon—­”

The beauty of it brought a thrill to the roots of Mary’s hair—­brought quick tears to her eyes—­and she was wondering if Wally was right, after all—­if love (as he often told her) was indeed the one great thing of life and nothing else mattered, when her door opened and Helen came twittering in.