Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia's acquired fear of him as the bogey-man of her mother's exhortations. It is true that she was, as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her; but, after a momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic, superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He waited for her to speak, and she finally said: "It's awfully good of you to put it that way! I've been afraid you must have been angry with me and hurt that I--so you didn't mind at all!" Rankin smiled at little ruefully at her swift conclusion. "I believe in telling the truth, even to young ladies, and I can not say I didn't mind at all--or that I don't now. But I am convinced that you were right in dropping me--out of the realm of acquaintances." His assumption was, Lydia saw with gratitude, that they were talking simply about a possible acquaintanceship between them. "It's evidently true--what I told you the very first time I saw you. We don't belong in the same world." As he said this, he looked at her with an expression Lydia thought severe. She protested, "What makes you so sure?" "Because to live in my world--even to step into it from time to time--requires the courage to believe in it." "And you think I didn't?" asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture. "Did you?" he asked steadily. "You ought to know." There was silence, while Lydia turned her head away and looked at the brown, flat winter landscape jerking itself past the windows as the car began to develop speed in the first long, open space between settlements. She was trying to remember something distinct about the nightmare of misery that had followed her admission of the identity of the man who had kissed her hand that starry night in October, but from the black chaos of her recollection she brought out only, "Oh, you don't realize how things are with a girl--how many million little ways she's bound and tied down, just from everybody in the family loving her as--" "Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn't the strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly couldn't have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to it. So it's all right, you see."