Her real reason for breaking with Grant was a desire to be wholly honorable with Craig. She resolved to burn her bridges toward Arkwright, to put him entirely out of her mind--as she had not done theretofore; for whenever she had grown weary of Craig's harping on her being the aggressor in the engagement and not himself, or whenever she had become irritated against him through his rasping mannerisms she had straightway begun to revolve Arkwright as a possible alternative. Craig's personality had such a strong effect on her, caused so many moods and reactions, that she was absolutely unable to tell what she really thought of him. Also, when she was so harassed by doubt as to whether the engagement would end in marriage or in a humiliation of jilting, when her whole mind was busy with the problem of angling him within the swoop of the matrimonial net, how was she to find leisure to examine her heart? Whether she wanted him or simply wanted a husband she could not have said. She felt that his eccentric way of treating the engagement would justify her in keeping Arkwright in reserve. But she was finding that there were limits to her ability to endure her own self-contempt, and she sacrificed Grant to her outraged self-respect. Possibly she might have been less conscientious had she not come to look on Grant as an exceedingly pale and shadowy personality, a mere vague expression of well-bred amiability, male because trousered, identifiable chiefly by the dollar mark. Her reward seemed immediate. There came a day when Craig was all devotion, was talking incessantly of their future, was never once doubtful or even low-spirited. It was simply a question of when they would marry--whether as soon as Stillwater fixed his date for retiring, or after Craig was installed. She had to listen patiently to hours on hours of discussion as to which would be the better time. She had to seem interested, though from the viewpoint of her private purposes nothing could have been less important. She had no intention of permitting him to waste his life and hers in the poverty and uncertainty of public office, struggling for the applause of mobs one despised as individuals and would not permit to cross one's threshold. But she had to let him talk on and on, and yet on. In due season, when she was ready to speak and he to hear, she would disclose to him the future she had mapped out for him, not before. He discoursed; she listened. At intervals he made love in his violent, terrifying way; she endured, now half-liking it, now half-hating it and him, but always enduring, passive, as became a modest, inexperienced maiden, and with never a suggestion of her real thoughts upon her surface.