These mental exercises, this double life that she lived, kept her inexperienced. At thirty she knew less of the world than a girl in her first season; and at thirty she met Ashton Clarke. Western society is elastic, or Clarke never would have been on the edges even; he never did get any further, and his morals were more dubious than his position; but he was Abbie’s first impassioned suitor, and his flattering love covered every crack in his manners or his habits. Men had asked her to marry them before, but never had a man made love to her. For two weeks she was a happy woman. Then came discovery, and the storm broke. The Courtlandts were in a rage—except gentle Madam Courtlandt, who was broken-hearted and ashamed, which was worse for Abbie. Jack, the older brother, was summoned from Chicago. Ralph, the younger, tore home on his own account from Yale. It was really a testimony to the family’s affection for Abbie that she created such a commotion, but it did not impress her in that way. In the end she yielded, but she yielded with a sense of cruel injustice done her. Time proved Clarke worse than her people’s accusations; but time did not efface what the boys had said, much less what the girls had said. They forgot, of course; it is so much easier to forget the ugly words that we say than those that are said to us. But she remembered that Jack felt that Abbie never did have any sense, and that Ralph raged because she did not even know a cad from a gentleman, and that Margaret, pacing the floor, too angry to sit still, would not have minded so much had Abbie made a fool of herself for a _man_; but she didn’t wait long enough to discover what he was; she positively accepted the first thing with a mustache on it that offered! Time healed her heart, but not her crushed and lacerated vanity. And it is a question whether we do not suffer more keenly, if less deeply, from wounds to the self-esteem than to the heart. Generally we mistake the former for the latter, and declare ourselves to have a sensitive heart, when what we do have is only a thin-skinned vanity!