Aunt Isabelle shook her head.  “No.  And, Mary, dear, I’ve faced all the loneliness, all the dependence, rather than be untrue to that which he gave me and I gave him.  There was one night, in this old garden.  I was visiting your mother, and he was in Congress at the time, and the garden was full of roses—­and it was—­moonlight.  And we sat by the fountain, and there was the soft splash of the water, and he said:  ’Isabelle, the little bronze boy is throwing kisses at you—­do you see him—­smiling?’ And I said, ’I want no kisses but yours’—­and that was the last time.  The next day he was killed—­thrown from his horse while he was riding out here to see—­me.

“It was after that I was so ill.  And something teemed to snap in my head, and one day when I sat beside the fountain I found that I couldn’t hear the splash of the water, and things began to go; the voices I loved seemed far away, and I could tell that the wind was blowing only by the movement of the leaves, and the birds rounded out their little throats—­but I heard—­no music——­”

Her voice trailed away into silence.

“But before the stillness, there were others who—­wanted me—­for I hadn’t lost my prettiness, and Frances did her best for me.  And she didn’t like it when I said I couldn’t marry, Mary.  But now I am glad.  For in the silence, my love and I live, in a world of our own.”

“Aunt Isabelle—­darling.  How lovely and sweet, and sad——­” Mary was kneeling beside her aunt, her arm thrown around her, and Aunt Isabelle, reading her lips, did not need to hear the words.

“If I had been strong, like you, Mary, I could have held my own against Frances and have made something of myself.  But I’m not strong, and twenty-five years ago women did not ask for freedom.  They asked for—­love.”

“But I want to find freedom in my love.  Not be bound as Porter wants to bind me.  He’d put me on a pedestal and worship me, and I’d rather stand shoulder to shoulder with my husband and be his comrade.  I don’t want him to look up too far, or to look down as Gordon looks down on Constance.”

“Looks down?  Why, he adores her, Mary.”

“Oh, he loves her.  And he’ll do everything for her, but he will do it as if she were a child.  He won’t ask her opinion in any vital matter.  He won’t share his big interests with her, and so he’ll never discover the big fine womanliness.  And she’ll shrivel to his measure of her.”

Aunt Isabelle shook her head, smiling.  “Don’t analyze too much, Mary.  Men and women are human—­and you may lose yourself in a search for the Ideal.”

“Do you know what Porter calls me, Aunt Isabelle?  Contrary Mary.  He says I never do things the way the people expect.  Yet I do them the way that I must.  It is as if some force were inside of me—­driving me—­on.”

She stood up as she said it, stretching out her arms in an eager gesture.  “Aunt Isabelle, if I were a man, there’d be something in the world for me to do.  Yet here I am, making ends meet, holding up my part of the housekeeping with Susan Jenks, and taking from the hands of my rich friends such pleasures as I dare accept without return.”