"As if I'd make fun of you, child!" cut in the doctor, still more sharply. "Oh, but I can't blame you, of course," she smiled wistfully; "and especially now that I see myself how absurd I was to think, for a minute, that I could make myself over into a--a--the sort of wife that Burke Denby would wish to have." "Absurd that you could-- Come, come! _Now_ what nonsense are you talking?" snapped the doctor. "But it isn't nonsense," objected Helen Denby earnestly. "Don't you suppose I know _now_? I used to think it was something you could learn as you would a poem, or that you could put on to you, as you would a new dress. But I know now it's something inside of you that has to grow and grow just as you grow; and I'm afraid all the putting on and learning in the world won't get _me_ there." "Oh, come, come, Mrs. Denby!" expostulated the doctor, in obvious consternation. "But it's so. Listen," she urged tremulously. "Now I--I just can't like the kind of music Burke does,--discords, and no tune, you know,--though I've tried and tried to. Day after day I've gone into the music-room and put in those records,--the classics and the operatic ones that are the real thing, you know,--but I can't like them; and I still keep liking tunes and ragtime. And there are the books, too. I can't help liking jingles and stories that _tell_ something; and I don't like poetry--not real poetry like Browning and all the rest of them." "Browning, indeed! As if that counted, child!" "Oh, but it's other things--lots of them; vague, elusive things that I can't put my finger on. But I know them now, since I've been here with your sister and her friends. Why, sometimes it isn't anything more than the way a woman speaks, or the way she sits down and gets up, or even the way a bit of lace falls over her hand. But they all help. And they've helped me, too,--oh, so much. I'm so glad now of this chance to thank you. You don't know--you can't know, what it's been for me--to be here." "But I thought you just said that you--you _couldn't_--that is, that you'd--er--given up," floundered the doctor miserably, as if groping for some sort of support on a topsy-turvy world. "Given up? Perhaps I have--in a way--for myself. You see, I know now that you have to begin young. That's why I'm so happy about Betty. I don't mind about myself any more, if only I can make it all right for her. Dr. Gleason, I couldn't--I just _couldn't_ have her father ashamed of--Betty!" "Ashamed of that child! Well, I should say not," blustered the doctor incoherently; "nor of you, either, you brave little woman. Why--" "Betty _is_ a dear, isn't she?" interrupted the mother eagerly. "You _do_ think she'll--she'll be everything he could wish? I'm keeping him always before her--what he likes, how he'd want her to do, you know. And almost always I can make her mind now, with daddy's name, and--" The doctor interrupted with a gesture of impatience.