"Oh, Myra, I thought I was so strong, and I'm not!" she wept. "The bullet in a gun hasn't less to say about where it shall be sent. I said it wasn't the pinch, but it is--or part of it is. Poppa has set his heart upon trying the mountains again, old as he is, and he can't go because--because there isn't money enough to outfit him with what he could carry on his back!" "And you would have let me go without telling me!" said Myra reproachfully. "He shall have a whole pack train of 'grub stake,'--is that what I should say?--and you shall come and stay with us while he is away. Consider that a trouble past, and tell me some more. You don't know how delicious it is to be permitted to pose as a small god in a car." "Yes, I do," Connie responded, out of a heartful of similar ecstasies. "But it isn't a trouble past: he won't let you do it. Everybody has been offering to lend him money, and he won't take it." "He will have to take it from me," said Myra, with prompt decision. "I'll make him. And when he goes, you will come to us, won't you?" Constance looked up with a smile shining through the tears. "You're good, Myra, just like Dick! But I can't, you know. I must stay here." "Why must you?" To the querist there seemed to be sufficiently good reasons, from the point of view of the proprieties, for setting Connie's decision aside mandatorily, but Myra had grown warier if not wiser in her year of cousin-kenning. "There are reasons,--duties which I must not shirk." "Are they namable?" "Yes; Margaret is the name of one of them." Myra's disapproval found vent in gentle foot-tappings. To the moderately compassionate on-looker it would seem that Constance had long since filled that measure of responsibility,--filled and heaped it to overflowing. But again the experienced one was discreet. "As Dick would put it, you have 'angeled' Margaret for a year and more. Isn't she yet able to stand alone?" Connie's answer was prompt and decisive. "Quite as well able as the best of us would be under similar conditions." "I wouldn't make it conditional; but we've never been able to keep step in that journey. Why is Margaret's case exceptional?" "Did I say it was? It isn't. She is just one of any number of poor girls who are trying to live honestly, with the barriers of innocence all down and an overwhelming temptation always beckoning." Myra shook her head. "That is making temptation a constraint, when it can never be more than a lure. I must confess I can't get far enough away from the conventional point of view to understand how a young woman like Margaret, who has been lifted and carried and set fairly upon her feet, could be tempted to go back to the utter misery and degradation of the other life." Constance spoke first to the sophism, and then to the particular instance.