"And so, can you not see, dear Aunt Polly, it isn't a thing that laws can touch; it isn't being good or bad--it is too big a Thing to call by name. Peneluna could starve and still keep it. She could be lonely and serve, but she _knew_. I don't love Larry, I cannot help it. All my life I am going to keep all of the promise I can, Aunt Polly, but I'm going to--to keep myself, too! A woman can give a man a good deal--but she can't give him some things if she tries to! Look at the women; some of them in the Forest. Aunt Polly, if marriage means what they look like----" Mary-Clare shuddered. Aunt Polly had suddenly grown tender and far-seeing. She let go the sounding words that Church and State had taught her. "Little girl," she said, and all her motherhood rushed forward to seize, as it had ever done, those "scraps" of others' lives, "suppose the time should come when there would be in your life another--someone besides Larry? Why has all this come so sudden to you?" Northrup seemed to loom in the room, just beyond the fire's glow. Her fear was taking shape. "Oh! dearie, I might then ask Larry to release me from my promise. My doctor used to say one could do that, but if he would not, why, then--I'd keep my bargain as far as I could. But----" and here Mary-Clare rose and flung her arms above her head. The action was jubilant, majestic. "Oh! the wonder of it all; to be free to be myself and prove what I _think_ is right without having to take another's idea of it. I'll listen; I'll try to understand and be patient--but it cannot be wrong, Aunt Polly, the thing I've done--since this great feeling of wings has come to me instead of heavy feet! Why, dear, I want something more than--than the things women _think_ are theirs. We don't know what is ours until we try." "And fail, my child?" Aunt Polly was crying. "Yes; and fail sometimes and be hurt--but paying and going on." "And leaving your man behind you?" "Aunt Polly"--Mary-Clare looked down upon the kind, quivering face--"a woman's man cannot be left behind. He'll be beside her somehow. If she stays back, as I've tried to do, she wouldn't be his woman! That's the dreadful trouble with Larry and me. But, dearie, it isn't always a man in a woman's life." "But the long, lonely way, child!" Polly was retracing her own denied womanhood. "It need not be lonely, dear, when we women find--other things. They will count. They must." "What other things, Mary-Clare?" "That's what we must be finding out, dear. Love; the man: some day they will be the glory, making everything more splendid, but not--the all. I think I should have died, Aunt Polly, had I kept on." Like an inspired young oracle, Mary-Clare spoke and then dropped again by the fire. "I've somehow learned all this," she whispered, "in my Place up on the hill. It just came to me, little by little, until it convinced me. I had to tell Larry the truth."