The blood rushed into her face. She would not think that! It would be unendurable to think he had not been sincere. "He felt it was perfectly all right for me to be the one to speak. And it was!" Of course it was. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. She herself had once refused an offer of marriage, and certainly the rejected suitor had not seemed to suffer any pangs of shame! He had displayed a rather mean anger: "He wanted my money, and he was hopping mad when he couldn't get it. I didn't want to get anything. I only wanted to give! So why don't I brace up? I had a right to 'give.'" She was quite certain that she had a right, so why was she so miserable? So--ashamed. In spite of herself she said the word. She had shied away from it, and refused to utter it, a dozen times; but at last, here, alone, she had to tell herself the truth. She was ashamed. It is only when Truth speaks to us, as in the cool of the day the Voice of God spoke in the Garden, that the human creature knows he is ashamed. Not to feel Shame is to be deaf to that Voice. Frederica was not deaf; but the Voice was very faint, very wandering and indirect. She could hardly hear it. It spoke first in her vague wish that Howard had said he would rather talk to her than any "girl" he knew; and then it spoke in the wonder whether a man does like to be "asked." "If he doesn't, it's just idiotic tradition. It belongs to the days of slavery!" But how did the tradition grow up that a woman mustn't ask a man to marry her? She tried to remember something Arthur Weston once said about men being "born hunters." Her lip drooped, angrily; "Rot!" she said; "when it comes to love, a woman has as much at stake as a man. No, she has more at stake! She has the child. Queer," she thought, "the woman is always the one who sticks to the child." She wondered if that was because women pay such a price for children? It occurred to her, with a sense of having made a discovery, that all through nature, the mother cares for her offspring just in proportion to what it costs her to bring it into the world.