“Otherwise I were no man!”

“You are right!”

Her disdainful eyes wandered to the farther end of the portico, where Alfred Branch, in his natty suit of white grasscloth, plucked at his ebon whiskers with untanned fingers, and talked society nothings with the ever-complaisant Imogene.

“Come what may, you, Mr. Chilton, have occupation for thought and hands; are not tied down to a detestable routine of vapid pleasures and common-place people!”

“You are—­every independent woman and man—­is as free in this respect as myself, Miss Rosa.  None need be a slave to conventionality unless he choose.”

She made a gesture that was like twisting a chain apon her wrist.

“You know you are not sincere in saying that.  I wondered, moreover, when you were railing at the practicalities of city life, if you were learning, like the rest of the men, to accommodate your talk to your audience.  Where is the use of your trying to disguise the truth that all women are slaves?  I used to envy you when I was in Philadelphia, last winter, when you pleaded business engagements as an excuse for declining invitations to dinner-parties and balls.  Now, if a woman defies popular decrees by refusing to exhibit herself for the popular entertainment, the horrible whisper is forthwith circulated that she has been ‘disappointed,’ and is hiding her green wound in her sewing-room or oratory.  ‘Disappointed,’ forsooth!  That is what they say of every girl who is not married to somebody by the time she is twenty-five.  It matters not whether she cares for him or not.  Having but one object in existence, there can be but one species of disappointment.  Marry she must, or be pitied!” with a stinging emphasis on the last word.

Tom Barksdale and Mabel were pacing the portico from end to end, chatting with the cheerful familiarity of old friends.  Catching some of thin energetic sentence, Mabel looked over her shoulder.

“Who of us is fated to be pitied, did you say, Rosa dear?”

“Never yourself!” was the curt reply.  “Rest content with that assurance.”

Her restless fingers began to gather the red leaves that already variegated the foliage of the creeper shading the porch.  Strangely indisposed to answer her animadversions upon the world’s judgment of her sex, or to acknowledge the implied compliment to his betrothed, Frederic watched the lithe, dark hands, as they overflowed with the vermilion trophies of autumn.  The September sunshine sifted through the vines in patches upon the floor; the low laughter and blended voices of the four talkers; the echo of Tom’s manly tread, and Mabel’s lighter footfall, were all jocund music, befitting the brightness of the day and world.  What was the spell by which this pettish girl who stood by him, her luminous eyes fixed in sardonic melancholy upon the promenaders, while she rubbed the dying leaves into atoms between her palms—­had stamped scenes and sounds with immortality, yet thrilled him with the indefinite sense of unreality and dread one feels in scanning the lineaments of the beloved dead?  Had her nervous folly infected him?  What absurd phantasy was hers, and what his concern in her whims?