When she was gone Brant found his way out of the house, and spent half the night tramping the hills to the westward of the suburb. Under favouring conditions self-respect is a plant of rapid growth, but it is sensitive in inverse proportion to its age. While he was very willing to call himself the chief of sinners, and to deprecate his own temerity in aspiring to a seat at the table of virtue, Brant was no more complaisant under reproach than any Pharisee of us all. For this cause he filled the hours of the solitary walk afield with bitter revilings heaped upon uncharity in general, and upon social canons as interpreted by the Mrs. Langfords in particular, going finally to his room in a frame of mind in which wrath and desperation far outran grief. “‘Give a dog a bad name,’” he fumed, flinging hat and overcoat into a corner and lighting the gas and a fresh cigar with the same match. “I might have known what it would come to. And all I asked in the wide world was to be let alone!” CHAPTER XII THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN A FORTNIGHT or such a matter after his rebuff in the presence of outraged art--typified by the newly finished “Sunset in Platte Cañon”--and a week after the Draconian episode and Brant’s dismissal by Mrs. Langford, Antrim took Isabel to the opera, meaning to have his answer once for all before he slept. Another man under similar hard conditions might have hesitated to preface his _coup de grace_ matrimonial with an evening’s amusement; but Antrim was wise in his generation, and he knew Isabel’s leanings well enough to be sure that no other preliminary would add more to his chances of success. Now _Rigoletto_, well sung, is a treat not to be despised even by a jaded theatregoer, and the younger Miss Langford was neither jaded nor lacking the artistic sense which finds its complement in good music. Wherefore she gave a little sigh of regret when the curtain ran down on the last act, and stood up mechanically in her place that Antrim might adjust her wrap. “Great show, wasn’t it?” he said, making a praise-worthy but purely manlike effort to strike the proper note of appreciation. She did not respond, and when they came out in the lighted foyer he saw the rapt isolation of her mood and resented it. “Up on top of the mountain as usual, aren’t you? Did you happen to come down far enough any time during the evening to think of the thing as a play meant to amuse people?” He tried to say it jestingly, but the whetstone of sarcasm sharpened the words in spite of the placable intention. “Don’t tease me, please, Harry; at least, not now while I’m in the seventh heaven of the aftermath. I’ll talk practical things with you by and by, if you like, but just now it would be sacrilege.”