But neither were her thoughts for publication; and she bridged the brief gap in the conversation with a not particularly successful smile, designed to show that of course nobody was taking all this very seriously.

“But why expect to do what we want?  No one can,” said she.  “You don’t mind my fidgeting about the room this way, do you?  I seem a little out of humor to-day—­not myself at all, as I was told just now....”

V.V. said that he did not mind.

“I wonder,” she went on, “if you remember something you said in your speech the other day?—­about being free....  It seemed strange to me then, that you should have happened to say just that, for I—­I’ve come to realize that, in a kind of way, that’s always been a wild dream of my own....  Don’t you think—­where there are so many things to think about, things and people—­that it’s pretty hard to be free?”

“Hard?...  There’s nothing else like it on earth for hardness.”

V.V. stood grasping the back of an ancient walnut chair.  It was seen that he belonged in this room, simple home of poverty; different from the girl, who was so obviously the rich exotic, the transient angel in the house.

He added:  “But it’s always seemed to me worth all the price of trying.”

“Oh, it is—­I’m sure.  And yet....  It seems to me—­I’ve thought,” said Cally, somewhat less conversationally, “that life, for a woman, especially, is something like one of those little toy theatres—­you’ve seen them?—­where pasteboard actors slide along in little grooves when you pull their strings.  They move along very nicely, and you—­you might think they were going in that direction just because they wanted to.  But they never get out of their grooves....  I know you’ll think that a—­a weak theory.”

“No, I know it’s a true theory.”

Surely the girl could not have been thinking only of her father’s business as she went on, more and more troubled in voice: 

“So much seems to be all fixed and settled, before one’s old enough to know anything about it—­and then there’s a great deal of pressure—­and a great deal of restraint—­in so many different ways....  Don’t you think it’s hard ever to get out of one’s groove?”

“It’s heroic.”

She put back her trailing motor-veil, and said:  “And for a woman especially?”

“It would take the strength of all the gods!...  I mean, of course—­as women are placed, to-day.  Perhaps in some other day—­perhaps to-morrow—­”

He broke off suddenly; a change passed over his face.

“And yet,” he added, in a voice gentle and full of feeling—­“some of them are doing it to-day.”

What his thought might be, she had no idea; but his personal implication was not to be mistaken.  The man from the slums, who had mistakenly put his faith in her once before in the Cooneys’ parlor, conceived that she was or might be one of these strong he spoke of; little suspecting her present unconquerable weakness.