Rose-Ann’s father lived, under the mismanagement of an unmarried sister, a fussy, well-meaning woman, in the rambling old house which Rose-Ann had described to Felix—the house in which she had been born. It was filled with vexatiously new furniture, except as to the old man’s study—a shabby, comfortable, low-ceilinged, book-lined room at the top of the house. It was to this room that Rose-Ann had once stolen, in the dead of night, to get the Dan-Emp volume of the Encyclopedia, to read about dancing. The Rev. Mr. Prentiss seemed more subdued in his home surroundings—a picturesque and mildly eccentric clergyman, but by no means the disturbing force he had been during his brief visit to them in Chicago the year before.... And Rose-Ann’s brothers were not at all the terrible persons he had been led to imagine—interested only in money-making. They were quite obviously proud of their father; and Felix felt that they were rather proud of him, too—pleased, at least, to have a “writer” in the family. They—or their wives—had severally subscribed to the Chicago Chronicle in order to read Felix’s dramatic criticisms, which they took very seriously, and sometimes clipped out and saved for their guidance when the plays of which he wrote reached Springfield. Felix had expected to find them alien and a little hostile; on the contrary he was rather embarrassingly deferred to—treated distinctly as a personage. He enjoyed his brief visit, and could not understand the relief Rose-Ann showed when they had bade her family good-bye and were on their way to visit his own parents on the farm further down in the state. It ought to be easy enough, he felt, to get along with such people as Rose-Ann’s relatives. It was the thought of seeing his own parents that filled him with uneasiness. “But, Felix,” she explained impatiently, “it’s because they _are_ my relatives. I feel their criticism all the time.” “I don’t think they criticize you any more,” he said. “You’ve had a struggle with them—and you’ve won. They’ve accepted the situation now. I think they’ve even accepted me.” “You’re not their property, and I am,” she said. “But it isn’t my brothers that count so much any more—we look prosperous, and that’s about as far as they can judge us. It’s my father—I feel as though he were seeing right through me ... and smiling.” “Smiling at what?” “At—my pretences. I can’t explain very well, but I feel as though I were a—a fake, a fraud, when I’m with him.” “But what about?”