She replied, “I beg your pardon for that. I could not help the constraint, and it pained me as greatly as it distressed you. We are free now, on our horses. We can talk without restraint, and when we have talked the matter out, perhaps you will understand. Listen, then!” She waited a full minute, the horses walking meanwhile, before she resumed. Finally Arthur said: “I am listening, Dorothy.” Then she answered. “My mother was never a bad woman, Arthur Brent. I want you to understand that clearly before we go on. She abandoned my father because she could not endure the life he provided for her. But she was always a pure woman, in spite of all her surroundings and conditions. She offered freedom to my father, but she asked no freedom for herself. She made no complaint of him, and his memory is still to her the dearest thing on earth. It is convention alone that censures her; convention alone that forbids her to come to Pocahontas; convention alone that refuses to me permission to love her openly as my mother and to honor her as such. If I had my way, I should bring her to Pocahontas, and set up housekeeping there; and I should send out a proclamation to everybody, saying in effect: ‘My mother, Mrs. South, is with me. You who shall come promptly to pay your respects to her, I will count my friends. All the rest shall be my enemies.’ But that may not be. My mother forbids, and I bow to my mother’s command. Then comes my father’s command, and to that I will never bow.” “What is it, Dorothy?” “Aunt Polly has shown me his letter. He tells me that because of my mother’s misbehavior, he has great fear on my account. He explains that he forbids me to learn music because he thought it was music that led my mother into wrong ways. He tells me that in order to preserve my ‘respectability’ he has arranged that I shall marry into a Virginia family as good as my own, and as if to make the matter of my inconsequence as detestably humiliating as possible he tells me as I learned before and wrote to you from Paris, that he has betrothed me to Jeff Peyton. If there had been any chance that I would submit to be thus disposed of like a hogshead of tobacco or a carload of wheat, Jeff Peyton’s conduct would have destroyed it. The last time I met him in Europe you remember, he threatened me with this command of my father, and I instantly ordered him out of my presence. He had the impudence to come to Wyanoke last night--knowing that I was there, and that I was acting as hostess. It was nearly as bad as if I had been entertaining at Pocahontas. He made it worse by asking me if I had read my father’s letter, and if I did not now realize the necessity of marrying him in order that I might ally myself with a good Virginia family. He had just finished that insolence when you made your little speech, not only calling him a fool by plain implication, but proving him to be one. That’s why I thanked you, as I did.”