"That showed! Or take our Irving Place days. Many a play or concert she gave up for me--and gowns! She believed in me from the first. I can't forget that. What nonsense to talk of marriage shutting her out! We must not let her feel that way, Jean." "No," said the wife; for to such charity toward the beaten enemy had she already come. Indeed, her happiness had softened her to a point where she questioned whether MacGregor did Julie complete justice. He was a man of strong prejudices, set, dogmatic; even, she suspected, a man with a grievance, for Craig now told her that something in the nature of an engagement had once existed between his sister and his friend. Might not Atwood's insight be the truer? She began to put herself in Julie's place, and then, without much difficulty, saw herself acting Julie's part. Ambitious for Craig, scheming for him always, self-sacrificing if need arose, why should she not resent his marriage to a nobody whom she knew only as a model? This flooding charity likewise embraced Mrs. Fanshaw. Her mother's chronicles of the small beer of Shawnee Springs had continued with the punctuality of tides. The weekly letter seemed to present itself to her mind as an imperative duty, like the Wednesday prayer-meeting, Saturday's cleaning, or church-going Sunday. Duty bulked less prominently in Jean's view of it, but she had answered, desultorily at first, and then by habit, almost with her mother's regularity. Yet she had told little of her life. The changes from cloak-factory to department store, from store to the Acme Company, and from the dental office to the studio had been briefly announced, but despite questions, never lengthily explained. Now she felt the need for confidence. Feelings quickened in her which she supposed atrophied, and under their impulsion she wrote her mother for the first time the true history of her flight from the refuge and traced the romance there begun to its miraculous flower.