“The end of it! That’s nonsense. I want you to marry Count de Lamolle. I don’t want to hear silly talk like this. I’ll write to him to-morrow.” “Well, it won’t do you or him any good,” said Maud, to whom fear was giving courage, “for I won’t marry him, and neither you nor he can drag me to the altar if I won’t go. It’s not the time of the Crusades.” If Maud’s allusion was not precisely illuminating, her mother understood it. “It may not be the time of the Crusades,” she said, grimly, “but neither is it a time when girls can be fools and no one hold out a hand to check them. Do you realize what this marriage means for you? Position, title, an entrance into society that you never in any other way could put as much as the end of your nose into.” “If I don’t want to put even the end of my nose into it, what good does it do me? You know I hate society. I hate going to dinners and sitting beside people who talk to me about things I don’t understand or care for. I hate going to balls and dancing round and round like a teetotum with men I don’t like. And if it’s bad here, what would it be over there where I don’t speak their language or know their ways, and they’d think I was just something queer and savage the count had caught over here with a lasso.” Fears and doubts she had never spoken of to any one but Latimer came glibly to her lips in this moment of misery. Her mother was surprised at her fluency. “You’re piling up objections out of nothing,” she said. “When those people over in France know what your fortune is, make no mistake, they’ll be only too glad to know you and be your friend. They’ll not think you queer and savage. You’ll be on the top of everything over there, not just one of a bunch of bonanza heiresses, as you are here. And the count? Do you know any one so handsome, so gentlemanly, so elegant and polite in San Francisco?” “I know a man I like better,” said Maud, in a muffled voice. The white face, with its dimly suggested figure, looked whiter than ever. “What do you mean by that?” said her mother, stiffening. “I mean Jack Latimer.” “Jack Latimer? One of your father’s clerks! Maud, come in here at once. I can’t stand talking in the hall of things like this.” “No, I won’t come in,” cried Maud, backing away against the baluster, and feeling as she used to do in her juvenile days, when she was hauled by the hand to the scene of punishment. “There’s nothing more to talk about. I’m engaged to Jack Latimer, and I’m going to marry him, and that’s the beginning and the end of it all.” She felt desperately defiant, standing there in the darkness looking at her mother’s massive shape against the glow of the lit doorway. “Jack Latimer!” reiterated Mrs. Shackleton, “who only gets a hundred and fifty dollars a month and has to give some of it to his people.” “Well, haven’t I got enough for two?”