When Hamilton knew her better, he did not like to think that he had thought her eighteen at their first meeting.  It impugned his judgment as a man of the world.  Young ladies of eighteen could not possibly be contributors of several years’ standing to the various magazines.  Disconcerting scraps of gossip floated to him.  He heard of her as bridesmaid at a famous wedding of six years back, when she had deflected the admiration from the bride and remained the central figure of the picture.  Her portrait by Sargent had been the sensation of the Salon when he had been a grubby-faced boy with his nose in a Latin grammar.  An unusual situation was abhorrent to him.  That he should marry an older woman, one, moreover, who had gained her public in a field to which he had not gained admission, was doubly distasteful by reason of his deference to the conventional.  If she had flirted with him, his midsummer madness would have evaporated into thin air; but she kept him at arm’s-length, ostensibly took him seriously, and the boy proposed.

Her rejection of him was a matter of such consummate skill that Hamilton did not realize the keenness of his disappointment till he was swinging westward over the prairies.  She had confided to him that her work claimed her and that she must renounce those sweet responsibilities that made the happiness of other women.  It was with the protective mien of one who sought to shield him from an adverse destiny that she declined his suit.

This had all happened seven years ago.  In the mean time he had adjusted his disappointment to the new life of the West.  To say that he had fallen in love with the situation would be to misrepresent him.  But the role of lonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first love was not without charm to Peter.  How long his constancy would have survived the test of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney’s compelling personality, other things being equal, it would be difficult to hazard a guess.  The coming of Judith from the convent increased the perspective into which Kitty was retreating.  With the vivid plainswoman in the foreground, the pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to reminiscence.  But the reverence for the usual, that made up the underlying motive for so much of Hamilton’s conduct, presented barriers alongside of which his previous quandary regarding Miss Colebrooke’s seniority shrank to insignificance.  He might marry a woman older than himself and swallow the grimace of it, but by no conceivable system of argument could he persuade himself to marry into a family like that of the Rodneys—­the girl herself, for all her beauty and rare womanliness, a quarter Indian, her father the synonyme for obloquy, her brother a cattle thief.  Hamilton preferred that other men should make the heroic marriages of a new country.  He was prepared to applaud their hardihood of temperament, but in his own case such a thing was inconceivable.  Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the web of caution and provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, the shrivelled flies dangling in the web conveying no significance, apparently, beyond that of advertising the system.