"If you don't, you'll break his heart," her father told her, in a voice of urgent persuasiveness. "For the present, at least, you must regard what I've told you as Masonically confidential."
"Why?"
"Because he would see himself as having hurt you where he sought only to be a loving magician with a wand of kindness, and I'm not the man to injure him like that." He hesitated, and the climax of his statement came with explosive suddenness. "Good God, Anne, he's just saved me from disgrace."
Then came the story of Colonel Wallifarro's latest benefaction, and at the end of it the girl pressed her hands to temples that were hot.
"I think," she said falteringly, "I'll go out for a while where the air is fresher. It's very close in here."
The door closed silently, almost stealthily, behind her, and Masters thought she walked with the noiseless care of one moving in a chamber of death.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Anne Masters looked out of the car windows with shadowed and preoccupied eyes on that journey from the mountains back to Louisville. The old conductor who always stopped and chatted with her, after a glance at her expression, punched her ticket and passed on. Something was not well with her, he reflected.
To this girl, the joyous sense of freedom had been the essence of life, and now she was going home with the feeling of one who has passed under a yoke. It was as if henceforth she were to know the sea which she had adventurously sailed in liberty only from the chained oar bench of the galley slave. She felt humiliated and utterly miserable, and perhaps, worst of all, she was oppressed by an unrelieved realization of her own futility. Beside the competence of the young woman who took dictation at Morgan's desk, her own social accomplishments appeared for the first time summoned for comparison, and the parallel left her branded in her own mind as an economic parasite. Marriage was the one way in which a woman of her sort could finance her life, and the only marriage which for her would be a fulfilment and not a travesty—itself requiring financing—lay remote.