"My hat!" she said in awed tones. Her hair swept over her leaning face; she pushed it back. "My hat!" Minga fell on her friend, burying her face in this long veil of hair. "I did--I did--I couldn't seem to help it--I was wild, you see, and I needed a friend, a sort of fatherly person, don't you know." Minga lifted her face and looked at her chum helplessly. "He is the only person that ever scolded me and made me mind, and so, you see, I loved him." There was a long silence, then, "I think he's wonderful. I thought maybe he could make me--make me--better." Sard, with a rush of understanding, threw her arms around the forlorn figure. "Poor little thing," she crooned. "No," said Minga with a kind of shudder, "not that any more, Sard. I guess I'm different now; I guess I've got to be a nut or high-brow or something. I've got to grow bigger, you see," with a piteous gesture. "I thought he might grow to care if he knew I did, and I told him. It was out by that fountain, you know, and the--the water seemed like tears." Minga's eyes widened over her own poetic thought. "My goodness," she ejaculated, "I'll always think of that now when I see that fountain." Then she went on, "But when I told him," the young voice broke a little piteously, "he just took my two hands as if he was going to sort of hold me from myself and himself. Oh, a terrible way and then he said ... he just said, 'You are a very dear little thing, you are a very dear little thing'--and it was finished," said Minga with her childish gulp. "I couldn't screech or howl and make him come back. I--I didn't even try. He just walked away from me. It was like a play, only awful; he walked right straight toward the mountain--I saw him in the moonlight and now," said Minga, "I--I have this awful ache." There was a long silence, Sard trying to understand this change in her friend. She began suddenly to see as if unrolled on a flaming scroll another great law of lives like Minga's, that whoever tries to control them will lose them, but whoever knows how to control them and does not try has them bound fast and submissive. In the new days of the rapid rising of women this fact contains a new challenge for men. There is no reason why women should not rise but there also is no reason why men, once superior, now rapidly being rated as inferior, at least by women, should not look into this challenge. If woman grows more fine, why should not a man also rise and create a new fineness that shall still dominate her and make her happy in that mastery for which she will forever ask. The moonlight shone through the long luxurious rooms, the silver patterns threw their strange symbols on the floor until almost morning, and the dawn became a steadiness of gray and rose. When at last they parted, Sard looked thoughtfully at her friend. "The trial's on to-day," she said slowly, "and the Bunch are all mad, so they won't go; and I don't think you ought to go, Minga."