“What do you mean to make of yourself, Miss Vogdes?” she snapped suddenly, just as Kitty was counting the hen-coops of the society in the field they were passing, and wondering how she could contrive to get a pair of their Cochin Chinas.

“To make?” stammered Kitty ("I knew she would take me by the throat somehow,” she thought)—­“of myself?—­Why, I am Peter Guinness’s daughter.”

“You poor child!” Miss Muller laughed.  It was a very merry, infectious laugh.  She laid her hand on Kitty’s shoulder gently, as though she had been a helpless kitten.  “Now you see how our social system works, William.  Ask a boy that question, and his answer comes pat—­a doctor, carpenter, what not.  In any case, he has a career, an independent soul and identity.  This poor girl is—­Peter Guinness’s daughter, is content to be that.  Though perhaps,” turning sharply on her, “she thinks of the day when she will be the wife of somebody, the mother of children.  Those, two ideas are enough to fill the brains of most women.”

Mr. Muller colored, and smiled significantly to himself.  Catharine looked at her with a grave suspense, but made no answer.

“Yes,” Miss Muller went on, a certain heat coming into her delicate face, “that contents the most of them—­to be the fool or slave of a lover or a husband or son.  ’The perfume and suppliance of a minute—­no more but that.’”

She walked on in silence after this, and Catharine scanned her quietly.  She was not at all the mad woman Mrs. Guinness had always described her—­not at all what Kitty had fancied a lecturer on woman suffrage, a manager of the Water-cure and a skillful operating surgeon must be.  She was little, pretty, frail, with a very genuine look and voice—­almost as young as Kitty, and far more tastefully dressed.  Catharine eyed her wonderful coiffure with envy, and was quite sure those rosy-tipped, well-kept fingers never had anything to do with cutting up dead babies.

Mr. Muller at the moment was comparing the two girls critically.  The point on which he dwelt longest was that his sister’s eyes, fine, limpid and brown, were those of an actress, acting to herself very probably.  They went through the whole imperative mood—­exhorted, commanded, entreated in five minutes:  even a certain woeful sadness which came into them at times, and was there now, was quite bare and ready to be seen of all men.

“She is always on review before herself:  she is conscious of herself from head to foot,” he thought with shrewdness only born out of long knowledge.  “Her very toes, I’ve no doubt, say to each other, ’I, Maria.’”

As for his future wife, her eyes were given her to see with, nothing more.  “And she looks out with them, never in,” he reflected complacently.  For he had come by this time to regard her as his future wife.  It seemed quite natural when Maria presently took Kitty in hand as one of the family, and began to manage for her as she did for them all, from Grandfather Hicks down to the dog Tar.