The invincible "Warrior" smiled kindly, and saw that tears were gathering in her daughter's eyes. "Would you perhaps like me to go through these things with you, and explain them to you one by one?" she continued. "I have had to learn it all myself. I might save you a good many pitfalls in the remote future." Leonetta's throat was dry, and her lips were parched. "No, thank you," she replied hoarsely, and she made quickly towards the door. "You have not told me what you wanted to say," said her mother playfully. "I'll tell you later on," rejoined the girl in broken tones. "Then will you please ring for Wilmott?" said Mrs. Delarayne, turning calmly to face her mirror again. And after savagely pressing the bell, the flapper vanished. With her eyes blinded by stinging tears, and feeling very much more maddened by regret than by mortification, Leonetta fled to her room. She was not only staggered, she was also thoroughly ashamed. A boy suddenly butted by a lamb, which he had believed he might torment with impunity, could not have felt more astonished. A convert brought face to face with the livid wounds which, in her days of unbelief, she had inflicted upon a Christian martyr could not have felt more deeply dejected and penitent. Like a flash, an old emotion of childhood had filled her breast; an old emotion that seemed only to have gathered strength in the intervening years,--that blind, unthinking and dependent love of the infant for its mother. Should she go back and throw herself at the wonderful woman's knees? Should she set out her plea for forgiveness in the folds of her mother's dress as she had done as a baby? No, Wilmott would be there,--Wilmott and everything besides! Moreover,--she looked in the glass,--her face was distraught, her ears flared, her eyes still smarted horribly. Even if Wilmott were dismissed as before, the girl would guess something. Slowly she proceeded with her dressing, and, as she did so, a certain vague delicacy of feeling, a sort of secret reverence for her brave youth-loving mother downstairs, kept her from glancing too frequently in the glass. The contrast now, instead of elating her, simply accentuated her reminiscence of guilt. The very speed with which she adjusted her hair and made it "presentable," as her mother had expressed it, brought back the cruel memory of what had happened only a few minutes previously. In being thus affected by Mrs. Delarayne's able and perfectly relentless handling of a difficult situation; in feeling her love for her mother intensified backwards, so to speak, to the degree it had attained in infancy, as the result of the incident, Leonetta showed not only that she was worthy of her incomparable mother, but also that she had survived less unimpaired, than some might have thought, the questionable blessings of a finishing education.