Ever since her childhood the prospect of laying aside her own will had stirred her to revolt. She could still remember waking herself up with a start in terror at the thought that in sleep she would doff her will for so many hours. Later her father had wished to send her to a fashionable boarding school; but she had made such wild scenes at the idea of being shut up—of being one of a community—that the plan had been given up. She would have married anyone in order to be free, but being already uncommonly free she rebelled at the idea of giving up her individuality by marriage, particularly by marriage with Ilseboro. She broke her engagement. Ilseboro had loved her and made himself disagreeable. She never forgot the parting curse he put upon her.
"The trouble with being such a damned bully as you are, my dear Lydia," he said, "is that you'll always get such second-rate playmates."
She answered that no one ought to know better than he did. His manner to her servants had long secretly shocked her. He spoke to them without one shade of humanity in his tone, yet oddly enough they all liked him except the chauffeur, who was an American and couldn't bear him, feeling the very essence of class superiority in that tone.
A few months later she showed an English illustrated to Miss Bennett.
"A picture of the girl Ilseboro is going to marry."
There was a pause while Miss Bennett read those romantic words: "A marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between George Frederick Albert Reade, Marquis of Ilseboro, and——"
"She looks like a lady," said Miss Bennett.
"She looks like a rabbit," said Lydia. "Just think how Freddy will order her about!"
It was not in her nature to feel remorse for her well-considered actions, and she soon forgot that Ilseboro had ever existed, except for certain things she had learned from him—a way of being silent while people explained to you you couldn't do something you intended to do, and then doing it instead of arguing about it, as had been her old habit; and an excellent manner with butlers too.
Her foot pressed gently on the accelerator, when the road became straight, holding the car now at forty miles. On either side of the road purple cabbages grew like a tufted carpet to the very edge of the macadam, without fences or hedges to protect them. There was enough mist in the autumn air to magnify the low hills along the Sound to an imposingly vague bulk, and to turn the cloudless sky to a threatening bluish gray. In every other direction the flat, fertile, sandy plains of Long Island stretched uninterruptedly.