She really could make no satisfactory reply to this question that suggested itself to her; for clever and all as she was, she was as imperfectly acquainted with her own character as most other women are of theirs. The eagerness with which she had carried out her scheme of adopting the _role_ of a retributory Providence in respect of Mr. Kelton had not given her a hint as to what was the dominant impulse of her nature; nor had her enthusiasm in regard to the working of her father’s farm and the reform of the dairy revealed it to her; though she had been on the brink of a discovery of the truth when she had had her conversation with her friend Rosa going a-primrosing, and had said that if a man sometimes was the means of a girl’s sudden development into a woman, she was equally sure that it was a woman who made a man of a man. She did not know that in herself was so strongly developed the instinct of woman to be a maker of men--to put forth her strength in order that they may be strong. To be the mother of a man child, to give him of the sustenance of her body, to have him by her side and to have command over him until he breaks away, as she thinks, from her control, leaving her in tears, but always ready to advise him in the taking of a wife and to advise the wife, when she is chosen, how to conduct her household--that is the best part of the nature of a woman. But the exercise of the power to influence a man, to make herself necessary to the happiness and the prosperity of a man, is the most irresistible joy that a woman can know, though she does not know it. Priscilla Wadhurst had felt a certain satisfaction in the thought that she had the destiny of Mr. Kelton under her fingers, so far as Framsby’s concerts were concerned; and she had been greatly gratified when her father had admitted that her reform of the dairy was a step in the right direction. But what were these triumphs compared to those that she longed to effect, though she might not have part or lot in the supreme tableaux in the procession of events? And yet, in spite of the consciousness that she had exercised her influence upon another man for his benefit, she sat there asking herself why she should feel it as a personal matter whether Jack Wingfield made a fool of himself over his tennis or in any other way? And then she saw once again the look that had appeared on his face for more than a moment when his eyes were upon her. It had startled her, and the recollection of it gave her a little fright. But her fright quickly subsided, and she sat there losing herself and all sense of her surroundings in the thoughts that came down upon her, not like a riotous throng of fantastic things, but like a silver mist shot through with a gleam of golden light here and there, but making everything about her seem blurred--indefinite as the future seems to any one landing on the shore of a strange land.