“I was going to arrange all that my own self, and now just see what you have done to me and a whole lot of other women, besides making me miserable all summer,” and crowded so close under his chin that he couldn’t see my face, I told him all about the tinder-box Jane had loaded and then set me on the lid to see that it exploded.

I had just worked myself up to the point of how my incendiary mission was about to touch off all the other love affairs in town, when he began to shake so with disrespectful laughter that I felt that my dignity was about to demand that I withdraw coldly from his arms, where I had just got so warm and comfortable and at home; but with the first slight intimation of my intention, which was conveyed by a very feeble indeed loosening of my arms from around his Henry Clay collar, he held me firmly against him and controlled his unseemly mirth, only I could still feel it convulsing his left lung,—­though as I had no business being near enough to notice it, I felt it only fair not to.

“Please don’t worry about those other Five dear women,” he begged, in the nicest and most considerate voice possible so that I tightened my arms again as I listened.  “If Miss Mathers doesn’t feel justified in giving up the dowries by your—­your failure to prove the proposition, we can just invite them all down here and in Glendale and Bolivar and Hillsboro and Providence, to say nothing of the countryside, we can plant them all cozily.  I can delicately explain to their choices exactly how to let them manage circumstances like—­” he illustrated his scheme just here until it took time for me to get breath to listen to the rest of his apology—­“this and there is no telling, with such a start as the cult has got in the Harpeth Valley already, how far ft will spread.  Please forgive me, dear!”

“Yes,” I answered doubtfully.  Then I raised my head and looked him full in the face as I made my declaration calmly but with the perfect conviction that I still have and always will have, world without end.  “Yes, but don’t you think for one minute I don’t know that what Jane and I and all the most advanced women in the world are trying for is the right and just and the only way for men and women to come logically into the kind of heritage you and I have stumbled into.  Absolute freedom and equality between all human beings is going to be the price of Kingdom Come.  I shall always be humiliated that I got scared out in the graveyard and didn’t do it to you.  It is going to be the regret of my life.”

“Truly, I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he answered most contritely.  “If I were to take my hat and go back to the gate and come in again properly and let you do it, would that make you feel any better?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” I answered quickly because why should I be separated from him all the two and a half minutes it would take to play out that farce, when I have been separated from him all the twenty-five years that stretch from now back until the day of my birth?  “I am going to bear it bravely and hold up my head and tell Jane—­”