“Life!” she answered.  “I am only a dead machine, except when I am living out my true self.”

He deliberately placed his hand on hers as it lay on the table.  “You make me want to clasp hands with you.  Do you realize what a big truth you have gotten hold of—­and all that it involves?”

“I only know what it means to me.”

“You are not free to be yourself?”

“I have never drawn a natural breath except in secret.”

Tillie’s face was glowing.  Scarcely did she know herself in this wonderful experience of speaking freely, face to face, with one who understood.

“My own recent experiences of life,” he said gravely, “have brought me, too, to realize that it is death in life not to be true to one’s self.  But if you wait for the freedom to be so—­” he shrugged his shoulders.  “One always has that freedom if he will take it—­at its fearful cost.  To be uncompromisingly and always true to one’s self simply means martyrdom in one form or another.”

He, too, marveled that he should have found any one in this household to whom he could speak in such a vein as this.

“I always thought,” Tillie said, “that when I was enough educated to be a teacher and be independent of father, I would be free to live truly.  But I see that you cannot.  You, too, have to hide your real self.  Else you could not stay here in New Canaan.”

“Or anywhere else, child,” he smiled.  “It is only with the rare few whom one finds on one’s own line of march that one can be absolutely one’s self.  Your secret life, Miss Tillie, is not unique.”

A fascinating little brown curl had escaped from Tillie’s cap and lay on her cheek, and she raised her hand to push it back where it belonged, under its snowy Mennonite covering.

“Don’t!” said Fairchilds.  “Let it be.  It’s pretty!”

Tillie stared up at him, a new wonder in her eyes.

“In that Mennonite cap, you look like—­like a Madonna!” Almost unwittingly the words had leaped from his lips; he could not hold them back.  And in uttering them, it came to him that in the freedom permissible to him with an unsophisticated but interesting and gifted girl like this—­freedom from the conventional restraints which had always limited his intercourse with the girls of his own social world—­there might be possible a friendship such as he had never known except with those of his own sex—­and. with them but rarely.  The thought cheered him mightily; for his life in New Canaan was heavy with loneliness.

With the selfishness natural to man, he did not stop to consider what such companionship might come to mean to this inexperienced girl steeped in a life of sordid labor and unbroken monotony.

There came the rustle of Amanda’s skirts on the stairs.

Fairchilds clasped Tillie’s passive hand.  “I feel that I have found a friend to-night.”

Amanda, brilliant in a scarlet frock and pink ribbons, appeared in the doorway.  The vague, almost unseeing look with which the teacher turned to her was interpreted by the vanity of this buxom damsel to be the dazzled vision of eyes half blinded by her radiance.