“I think you are wrong,” said John, “and I feel sure of so much as this:  that a man might often be or do for a woman’s sake that which he would not for its sake or his own.”

“That is quite another thing,” she said.  “There is in it no question of influence; it is one of impulse and motive.”

“I have told you to-night,” said John, “that what you said to me had influenced me greatly.”

“Pardon me,” she replied, “you employed a figure which exactly defined your condition.  You said I supplied the drop which caused the solution to crystallize—­that is, to elaborate your illustration, that it was already at the point of saturation with your own convictions and intentions.”

“I said also,” he urged, “that you had set the time for me.  Is the idea unpleasant to you?” he asked after a moment, while he watched her face.  She did not at once reply, but presently she turned to him with slightly heightened color and said, ignoring his question: 

“Would you rather think that you had done what you thought right because you so thought, or because some one else wished to have you?  Or, I should say, would you rather think that the right suggestion was another’s than your own?”

He laughed a little, and said evasively:  “You ought to be a lawyer, Miss Blake.  I should hate to have you cross-examine me unless I were very sure of my evidence.”

She gave a little shrug of her shoulders in reply as she turned and resumed her embroidery.  They talked for a while longer, but of other things, the discussion of woman’s influence having been dropped by mutual consent.

After John’s departure she suspended operations on the doily, and sat for a while gazing reflectively into the fire.  She was a person as frank with herself as with others, and with as little vanity as was compatible with being human, which is to say that, though she was not without it, it was of the sort which could be gratified but not flattered—­in fact, the sort which flattery wounds rather than pleases.  But despite her apparent skepticism she had not been displeased by John’s assertion that she had influenced him in his course.  She had expressed herself truly, believing that he would have done as he had without her intervention; but she thought that he was sincere, and it was pleasant to her to have him think as he did.

Considering the surroundings and conditions under which she had lived, she had had her share of the acquaintance and attentions of agreeable men, but none of them had ever got with her beyond the stage of mere friendliness.  There had never been one whose coming she had particularly looked forward to, or whose going she had deplored.  She had thought of marriage as something she might come to, but she had promised herself that it should be on such conditions as were, she was aware, quite improbable of ever being fulfilled.  She would not care for a man because he was clever and distinguished, but she felt that