"You see, Rose, your mother made a bad match. Her people, the few there were, repudiated her. I had no qualifications. I was a poor scribbler, too big, too robust, too everything to suit them. I breathed up all the air. I just went into their stained-glass seclusions and carried her off. They never forgave me." "Her father died very soon?" She had never referred to the two old people as her grandparents. She found, in her emotional treasury, no right to them, even as a memory. This hesitating question, indeed, seemed a liberty, as it subtly brought them nearer. "Yes. Your mother was prostrated by that. She had a strong sense of family feeling." Immediately Rose pictured to herself the wonder of having such clinging tendrils, to aspire upward, and such filaments of root, to mingle with kindred roots in a tended ground. Until now it had seemed to her brave and desirable to walk alone without inherited ties, the cool wind breathing about her, unchecked by walls of old restraint. Now, whether he was gently guiding her thoughts toward his desired ends, or whether some actual hunger in her was impelling them to seek lost possibilities, she did not know; but she was sad. She wanted the spacious boughs of a tree of family life to sit under, to play there and rest. He was continuing,-- "Above all, your mother was a woman of great loyalties, not only to individuals but to her inherited pride. You know that threadbare phrase, _noblesse oblige_? I can laugh when most of them use it. I never laughed when I saw her cutting her conduct by it." "I never knew--" She was about to say, in her glowing surprise, that she never knew he cared so much for her mother, or that he had been cherishing such memories. "That's the reason, my dear," he was saying now, "why you must model yourself on her, and not on me. I don't know that you ever had the least desire to model yourself on me, but I feel very strongly about your knowing what kind of woman she was and letting her--well, letting her decide things for you." "I wish"--All sorts of longings were choking her and crying for expression; but she could only finish, "I wish she had not died." "Yes, child. Now these people here, Rose,"--his voice had changed into a decisive affirmation,--"they are a good sort, very gentle, very well worth your meeting them with fairness. You haven't met them fairly. Now, have you?" "What do you mean?" She was trembling, not so much under his words as from her own dreary shame. The shame had been with her all day, until she was tired with it, and the words seemed to be little separate floutings to make the burden heavier. "Electra called you an adventuress. She had every right to." "Yes. She had every right to." But Rose spoke with the unreasoning bitterness of youth that, finding itself in the wrong path, is sure the way, once entered, has no turning. "She says you came here with a lie on your lips. Isn't that true?"