"You will have to accept it." "I cannot, Annie Eustace, of what do you think me capable? I am not as bad as you think. I cannot and will not accept that dinner and make the speech which they will expect and hear all the congratulations which they will offer. I cannot." "You must accept the dinner, but I don't see that you need make the speech," said Annie, who was herself aghast over such extremity of torture. "I will not," said Margaret. She was very pale and her lips were a tight line. Her eyes were opaque and lustreless. She was in reality suffering what a less egotistical nature could not even imagine. All her life had Margaret Edes worshipped and loved Margaret Edes. Now she had done an awful thing. The falling from the pedestal of a friend is nothing to hurling oneself from one's height of self-esteem and that she had done. She stood, as it were, over the horrible body of her once beautiful and adored self. She was not actually remorseful and that made it all the worse. She simply could not evade the dreadful glare of light upon her own imperfections; she who had always thought of herself as perfect, but the glare of knowledge came mostly from her appreciation of the attitude of her friends and lovers toward what she had done. Suppose she went home and told Wilbur. Suppose she said, "I did not write that book. My friend, Annie Eustace, wrote it. I am a thief, and worse than a thief." She knew just how he would look at her, his wife, his Margaret, who had never done wrong in his eyes. For the first time in her life she was afraid, and yet how could she live and bear such torture and not confess? Confession would be like a person ill unto death, giving up, and seeking the peace of a sick chamber and the rest of bed and the care of a physician. She had come to feel like that and yet, confession would be like a fiery torture. Margaret had in some almost insane fashion come to feel that she might confess to a minister, a man of God, and ease her soul, without more. And she had never been religious, and would have formerly smiled in serene scorn at her own state of mind. And here was the other woman whom she had wronged, forbidding her this one little possibility of comfort. She said again humbly, "Let me tell him, Annie. He will only think the more of you because you shielded me." But Annie was full of scorn which Margaret could not understand since her nature was not so fine. "Do you think I wish him to?" she said, but in a whisper because she heard voices and footsteps. "You cannot tell him, Margaret." Then Von Rosen and Aunt Harriet, whose eyes were dim with recent sleep, came in sight, and Harriet Eustace, who had not seen Margaret since the club meeting, immediately seized upon her two hands and kissed her and congratulated her.