“He said it had come to him here at Wild Acres that in spite of Mother’s and my stupidity, he didn’t want to go on fooling along with his best friend’s sister any longer. “I grabbed his hands. We were in the tearoom. They were building a house out of matches. He has marvelous hands, do you remember? Just looking at them stops your heart,—my heart. He pulled them away, and there mine lay, flat, on the tablecloth. I looked at them and looked at them. They seemed to have dropped off from my arms and be just lying there, you know. “He wouldn’t even look at me any more. His face was all twisted—snarly. Loathing me. I left my hands on the table and said over and over, ‘I love you. I love you. What has Glenn got to do with it? Or Mother? I’ll take all the responsibility. You’re afraid, that’s what’s the matter. You’re afraid of Glenn. And Mother. Afraid.’ “He got even angrier. He said, ‘Be quiet. Glenn Weyman’s friendship means more to me than necking with a dozen girls like you, or a hundred. How couldn’t it! He has a mind I respect. He’s a person. A contemporary I value. He means something in my life and always will, I hope. And of course, I’m not afraid of him. He isn’t the sort to let me down because I’ve kissed his sister a few times without matrimonial intentions. Not Glenn. Hugh’s in that class, perhaps. Hugh might raise a rumpus, even now, when we haven’t done anything. So what if we _had_? Doesn’t that scare _you_?’ “He said he didn’t suppose I was capable of understanding how much more real satisfaction it was to him to spend his time with a person like Glenn than to waste it dabbling for hours with me on the edge of a _slough of sentimentality tainted with sensuality_. The economical and fastidious thing, he said, was for him to take his intellectual companionship where he could find it, with fellows like Glenn, and when he wanted a girl he’d do what Stephen did before he lost his soul and married the nice daughter of his president.... Yes, Ariel. He said that. “He said, ‘If I ever do fall romantically in love, it would have to be with a developed personality, a real woman. Some one who has a life of her own, and to whom our passion would be just an incident of that life, not a fulfillment. _Some one like Mrs. Nevin._’ “Then I knew. It was Joan had done it all to him. Some of the very things he had said, she had said first, and he was just quoting. I _knew_....