It was on the tip of her tongue to exclaim: “Oh, but I didn’t know anything then--I wasn’t anybody! My real life, my only life, began years later--” but she checked herself with a start. Why, in the very act of thinking of her daughter, had she suddenly strayed away into thinking of Chris? It was the first time it had happened to her to confront the two images, and she felt as if she had committed a sort of profanation. She took refuge in another thought that Landers’s last words had suggested--the thought that if she herself had matured late, why so might Anne. The idea was faintly reassuring. “No; I won’t build on any theory,” she said, answering him. “But one can’t help hoping she’ll wait till some one turns up good enough for what she’s going to be.” “Oh, these mothers!” he laughed, his face smoothing out into its usual guileless lines. The music was over. The groups flowed past them toward the little tables in another picturesque room, and Lilla Gates swept by in a cluster of guffawing youths. She seemed to have attracted all the kindred spirits in the room, and her sluggish stare was shot with provocation. Ah, there was another mystery! No one explained Lilla--every one seemed to take her for granted. Not that it really mattered; Kate had seen enough of Anne to feel sure she would never be in danger of falling under Lilla’s influence. The perils in wait for her would wear a subtler form. But, as a matter of curiosity, and a possible light on the new America, Kate would have liked to know why her husband’s niece--surprising offshoot of the prudent Clephanes and stolid Drovers--had been singled out, in this new easy-going society, to be at once reproved and countenanced. Lilla in herself was too uninteresting to stimulate curiosity; but as a symptom she might prove enlightening. Only, here again, Kate had the sense that she, of all the world, was least in a position to ask questions. What if people should turn around and ask them about _her_? Since she had been living under her old roof, and at her daughter’s side, the mere suggestion made her tremble. It was curious--and she herself was aware of it--how quickly, unconsciously almost, she had slipped at last into the very attitude the Clephanes had so long tried to force upon her: the attitude of caution and conservatism. Her glance, in following Lilla, caught Fred Landers’s, and he smiled again, but with a slight constraint. Instantly she thought: “He’d like to tell me her whole story, but he doesn’t dare, because very likely it began like my own. And it will always go on being like that: whatever I’m afraid to ask they’ll be equally afraid to tell.” Well, that was what people called “starting with a clean slate”, she supposed; would no one ever again scribble anything unguardedly on hers? She felt indescribably alone.