"Does Margaret know I'm coming?" repeated Joshua mockingly. "Does Margaret know her own mind and me?... Before I forget it here's a list I wrote out against a lamp-post while I was waiting for you to come home. It's the things I must have, so far as I know. The frills and froth you know about--I don't." CHAPTER XVIII PEACE AT ANY PRICE Miss Severance, stepping out of a Waldorf elevator at the main floor, shrank back wide-eyed. "You?" she gasped. Before her, serene and smiling and inflexible, was Craig. None of the suits he had bought at seven that morning was quite right for immediate use; so there he was in his old lounge suit, baggy at knees and elbows and liberally bestrewn with lint. Her glance fell from his mussy collar to his backwoodsman's hands, to his feet, so cheaply and shabbily shod; the shoes looked the worse for the elaborate gloss the ferry bootblack had put upon them. She advanced because she could not retreat; but never had she been so repelled. She had come to New York to get away from him. When she entered the train she had flung him out of the window. "I WILL NOT think of him again," she had said to herself. But--Joshua Craig's was not the sort of personality that can be banished by an edict of will. She could think angrily of him, or disdainfully, or coldly, or pityingly--but think she must. And think she did. She told herself she despised him; and there came no echoing protest or denial from anywhere within her. She said she was done with him forever, and well done; her own answer to herself there was, that while she was probably the better off for having got out of the engagement, still it must be conceded that socially the manner of her getting out meant scandal, gossip, laughter at her. Her cheeks burned as her soul flamed. "The vulgar boor!" she muttered. Was ever woman so disgraced, and so unjustly? What had the gods against her, that they had thus abased her? How Washington would jeer! How her friends would sneer! What hope was there now of her ever getting a husband? She would be an object of pity and of scorn. It would take more courage than any of the men of her set had, to marry a woman rejected by such a creature--and in such circumstances! "He has made everybody think I sought him. Now, he'll tell everybody that he had to break it off--that HE broke it off!" She ground her teeth; she clenched her hands; she wept and moaned in the loneliness of her bed. She hated Craig; she hated the whole world; she loathed herself. And all the time she had to keep up appearances--for she had not dared tell her grandmother--had to listen while the old lady discussed the marriage as an event of the not remote future.