“No, I don’t hate you, in a rage or out of it,” he said coldly. “Often you go beyond your years, and you presume a good deal; but after a while you’ll make a good wife for the captain of a West India lugger or some fellow trading with Bermuda Hundred.” This was an adroit insult, and pleasurably he watched her flush. She became so unhappy that he was magnanimously touched with remorse, and said with a kindly condescension that it was too bad she hadn’t been born a boy. At that he had it swiftly proven to him that attitudes, interests, vocabularies were misleading, for logical and wholly feminine tears actually streamed over her healthy cheeks. It grew worse, for she rose and came close to him, with clasped desperate hands. “Don’t listen to him!” she begged. “He’s a horrid man of snow, even if he is your father; and if you let him he’ll spoil your life. Tell him that you have made up your mind to go to sea, and that nothing can change it. You won’t be struck dead. He isn’t God with a stick of lightning.” “You don’t understand,” he stammered, backing away from her, intolerably embarrassed. “I am not, as you seem to think, afraid of my father. I have been over and over it all in my head. No, it’s something different. You couldn’t understand,” he repeated. “No girl could.” “You are wrong,” she replied slowly. “I see all that you mean, and--yes--I suppose I admire you for it. You can’t mutiny”--she echoed his own phrase--“others could, but not a Calef. Yet you make me furious, you are so helpless, so stupid. You will marry Annice and grow fat and near-sighted, that’s what’ll happen to you.” Annice, in the doorway, asked: “Well, why not?” Disregarding Sumatra, Epes went forward to meet the girl who possessed the Calef token. He had, in spite of his assertions, forgotten how lovely she was, slender and palely gold; her gray-gold hair was like a cloud in sifted sunlight, her skin had an even, warm pallor that remotely suggested oranges, and her eyes were a cool autumnal brown. “Epes,” she continued, “how burned and well you look.” She took his vigorous hands in hers, held them lightly for a second, and then relinquished him. “There is an ocean of things for us to talk about and arrange,” she proceeded, from a divan; and her glance at Sumatra was a dismissal. The younger girl made a profound curtsy to them both, surprisingly graceful for her solidity of waist, and disappeared. Epes realized that he ought to kiss Annice, but he felt awkward in the extreme. She held her face delicately to him; it was like a tea rose. He was, he supposed, fortunate; but no sensation of gladness accompanied that supposition. It was so sad about Bartlett, she went on; and how enormously his death had affected them. Wasn’t it unexpectedly sweet of her mother to furnish their house--“in miraculous brocades and hangings, with a French boudoir”?