"Isn't she furious?"
"That newspaper article has repressed her fury. She's enormously sorry for you. Aunt Cynthia would never find it hard, you know, to be enormously sorry for a Van Corlear; she came so near to being one herself; a Schenectady is next door to it."
"Yes, I understand," mused Pauline. She was still staring into the fire. "There is that clannish feeling that comes out strong at such a time ... Court, I will write to her."
"Do, by all means."
"Not an apology, you know, but a ... well, a sort of pacific proposal."
"Do, you'll find it will be all right, then. Aunt Cynthia would never put on any grand airs to one of her own race; she has too much respect for it...."
The longest silence of all now ensued. The fire had ceased to crackle; its block of crumbled coal looked like the fragments of a huge crushed ruby. Pauline did not know that Courtlandt was watching her when she suddenly heard him say,—
"You're going to have a hard fight, Pauline, but you'll come out of it all sound—never fear. I suppose he was the sort of chap to play the mischief with a woman, if she once gave him a chance."
"O Court," came the melancholy answer, "I wasn't thinking of him, just then. I was thinking of what my life has meant! It seems to me, now, like a broken staircase, leading nowhere. Such a strange, unsatisfactory life, thus far!"
"All lives are that, if we choose to look on them so," returned Courtlandt. "It is the choosing or not choosing to look on them so that makes all the difference.... Besides, you are young yet."