Nothing in Claire's past had qualified her for this deft nicety of rebuke. Those stands made against her mother's coarse onsets had surely offered but a clumsy training-school for such delicate defiance. And yet her history has thus far been followed ill if what she said and did on a certain day in Mrs. Arcularius's school-room has not foreshadowed in some measure the line of her present action. Perhaps it was all purely instinctive, and there had been, back in the gentility of her father's ancestry, some dame of nimble repartee and impregnable self-possession, who had won antique repute as dangerous to bandy speech with. But Claire's tranquillity soon fled. She was scarcely out of Mrs. Arcularius's sight before an angry agitation assailed her. When, a little later, she met Sophia in one of the halls, it was with sharp difficulty that she hid her distress. Still, however, she did hide it, sure of no sympathy, in this quarter, of a sort that could help to heal her fresh wound. That evening, however, a little after the arrival of Hollister, and while they walked the sea-fronting lawns and listened to the distant band, as had now grown a nightly and accepted event with them, she narrated the whole circumstance of the morning. "Do you think I did right, Herbert?" she finished, sure of his answer before it came. "Perfectly, my darling," he said, looking down into her dim, uplifted face. "I wouldn't have had you do anything else. You must cut that old Gorgon if you ever meet her again. You must cut her dead, before she has a chance to serve the same trick on you." "I don't know about that," returned Claire, as if his words had set her thoughts into a new groove. "Perhaps she may be of use to me afterward. I may need her if we ever meet in ... society." She slightly paused before speaking the last word. "If she hasn't left by to-morrow I shan't see her, you know. I won't cut her; I simply shan't see her. It will be better." Hollister laughed. What he would have disliked in another woman fascinated him in Claire. "You little ambitious vixen," he said, in his mellow undertone. "I suppose you will lead me a fine dance, after we are married. I suppose you will make me strain and struggle to put you high up, on the top rung of the ladder." "I should like to be on the top rung of the ladder," said Claire, with that supreme frankness a woman sometimes employs when sure that the man who listens to her will clothe each word she speaks in an ideal halo. At the same time, she had an honest impulse toward Hollister which should be recorded to her credit. She had not planned for him any thrilling discoveries of her worldliness after their marriage; she candidly saved him all peril of disappointment. But he, on the other hand, could see neither rock nor shoal ahead. If she pointed toward them, he looked only at the hand which pointed, and not at the object it so gracefully signaled.