And yet she thought she was seeing him more clearly than when he was with her.  Oh wise young woman!  She fancied she was deliberating, looking at life with great prudence.  It must be one’s own fault if one makes a radical mistake in marriage.  She was watching the married people about her with more interest-the Morgans, our own household, Mrs. Fletcher; and besides, her aunt, whose even and cheerful life lacked this experience.  It is so wise to do this, to keep one’s feelings in control, not to be too hasty!  Everybody has these intervals of prudence.  That is the reason there are so few mistakes.

I dare say that all these reflections and deliberations in the maidenly mind were almost unconscious to herself; certainly unacknowledged.  It was her imagination that she was following, and scarcely a distinct reality or intention.  She thought of Henderson, and he gave a certain personality, vivid maybe, to that dream of the future which we all in youth indulge; but she would have shrunk from owning this even to herself.  We deceive ourselves as often as we deceive others.  Margaret would have repudiated with some warmth any intimation that she had lost her heart, and was really predicting the practical possibilities of that loss, and she would have been quite honest with herself in thinking that she was still mistress of her own feeling.  Later on she would know, and delight to confess, that her destiny was fixed at a certain hour, at a certain moment, in New York, for subsequent events would run back to that like links in a chain.  And she would have been right and also wrong in that; for but for those subsequent events the first impression would have faded, and been taken little account of in her life.  I am more and more convinced that men and women act more upon impulse and less upon deep reflection and self-examination than the analytic novelists would have us believe, duly weighing motives and balancing considerations; and that men and women know themselves much less thoroughly than they suppose they do.  There is a great deal of exaggeration, I am convinced, about the inward struggles and self-conflicts.  The reader may know that Margaret was hopelessly in love, because he knows everything; but that charming girl would have been shocked and wounded to the most indignant humiliation if she had fancied that her friends thought that.  Nay, more, if Henderson had at this moment made by letter a proposal for her hand, her impulse would have been to repudiate the offer as unjustified by anything that had taken place, and she would no doubt have obeyed that impulse.

But something occurred, while she was in this mood, that did not shock her maidenly self-consciousness, nor throw her into antagonism, but which did bring her face to face with a possible reality.  And this was simply the receipt of a letter from Henderson; not a love-letter—­far enough from that—­but one in which there was a certain tone and intention that the most inexperienced would recognize as possibly