Burning with resentment against herself for the thought, she turned aside and sat down on the river's brink in a shade of hemlocks. "Come," her actions seemed to say, "I will think of Henry Fair; gentle, noble Henry Fair, and what he is and will and might be; of how I love his mother and all his kindred; of how tenderly I admire him; and of his trembling words, 'I love you consumingly!'" Her heart quickened gratefully, as though he spoke again; but as she gazed down at the bubbles that floated by from a dipping bough she presently fell to musing anew on Fannie, without that inward shudder which the recollection of Fannie's course and fate commonly brought. "At least," she thought to herself, "it's heroic!" Yet before she could find a moment's comfort in the reflection it was gone, and she started up and moved on again, knowing that, whatever it may be for man, for true womanhood the better heroism is not to give a passionate love its unwise way at heroic cost, but dispassionately to master love in all its greatness and help it grow to passion in wise ways. "If I take this step," she began to say to herself audibly as she followed the old road out into a neglected meadow, "I satisfy my father; I delight my friends; I rid myself at once and forever of this dreadful dependence on him." She bit her lip and shut her eyes against these politic considerations. "He tells me to weigh the matter well. How shall I, when there's nothing to weigh against it? Fannie could choose between the one who loved her and the one she loved. I have no choice; this is the most--most likely it is all--that will ever be offered me. There's just the one simple sane question before me--Shill I or shall I?" She smiled. "We make too much of it all!" she thought on. "A man's life depends upon the man he is, not on the girl he gets; why shouldn't it be so with us?" She smiled still more, and, glancing round the open view, murmured, "Silly little country girls! We begin life as a poem, we can't find our rhyme, we tell our mothers--if we have any--they say yes, it was the same with our aunts; so we decide with them that good prose will do very well; they kiss us--that means they won't tell--and--O Heaven! is that our best?" She dropped upon a bank and wept till she shook.